Cutting the Food Cord
I just read the great article over at the Mun Fitness Blog called Why Teenagers Like Eating Fast Food? Having just done a show on childhood obesity, one of the points stuck out to me that Jeff and I probably didn’t totally address - rebellion. Here’s an excerpt:
At fast food restaurants, you choose what you want. You can mix and match with plenty of choices. Coke with French fries, sundae with apple pie, salad with burger.
I had never considered the rebellion factor. “You choose what you want” sums that up nicely. We tell kids what to eat, when to eat, you can’t leave the table unless you eat “x” as they’re growing up. When they get a chance to choose for themselves, they go in the exact opposite direction. Not all kids are going to rebel though. Some percentage of them will hear what their parents are saying and heed their advice. But what about that percentage, however large or small, that do rebel in this way.
Should we as parents go the opposite way. I remember an episode of the Cosby Show where Vanessa got drunk. When Cliff found out, he pulled out the bottle of whiskey and told her, “You wanna drink, let’s drink.” If you fed your kids fast food consistently for a period of time, would they rebel against that? Would they rebel before their weight tipped into the obese category? I worry that the treatment is worse than the affliction.
What is the right move then, from a parent’s perspective, to help kids/teens make the right decisions? Don’t give a kid money? Give him a pre-paid credit card and monitor the purchases? There are any number of ways you might try to reign in your kids, particularly teenagers, food choices. But in the end, will their desire to do exactly the opposite of what their parents tell them always put them in harm’s way nutritionally?
Eventually you have to cut the strings and let them make the decision for themselves. Hopefully Mun is wrong when he says “I doubt youngsters will listen”.
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One Comment on Cutting the Food Cord
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Fat 2 Fit Radio » Blog Archive » Childhood Obesity Makes the Cover of Time Magazine on
Thu, 10th Jul 2008 9:44 am
[...] obesity was the topic of Show #23, again in a post called Cutting the Cord and most recently on Show #32. We’ve really given a lot of time to this important topic. [...]
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