Getting My Kids to Eat

It's summer time and it means that the girls and I will be eating out on a picnic blanket a lot over the next few months. We will leave the pool with hungry bellies, so I am inspired again to get them to eat new things when they are desperately hungry without other options around.

This New York Times article inspired me since it seems like we have fallen into the kiddie menu. This summer I'm hoping back onto the "kids eat what the adults eat, or they can just be hungry" mentality. Read the article, it's great to know restaurants are starting to realize we would eat out more often if the kids had options other than mac and cheese, grilled cheese and chicken chunks. I couldn't help but copy what one reader wrote in response to the article, since he does have a point. Most of what I ate growing up was total 70's crap-tastic food.

Oh come on! The author ate what her parents ate- that proves this young
generation is going to pot. What a lot of hooey. I suppose if I too grew up in the upper echelons or in NYC, we’d have eaten out too. But growing up in the 70s, with four kids and a station wagon, we didn’t even DO restaurants. And we ate crap food at home: hamburger stew, mac and cheese, meat and potatoes. Inexpensive and something both kids and adults would eat. Where do you think ‘comfort food’ came from?
And not surprisingly, the 70s children grew into
anorexic children of the late 70s and early 80s, and many are now fat adults
that eat frozen meals from the grocer.

My point? There is nothing inherently wrong with ‘today’s generation’ and just because you got to travel Europe and eat Julia Child food hardly means the current generation of kids is somehow uniquely impoverished because they can eat out and have chicken strips. With some many pressing issues of the day regarding children of the world: child labour and exploitation, poverty, AIDS, and starvation and the best you could come up with is a rant against chicken strips in NYC restaurants!?

posted by Adios Amigos