It was the sight of balloon-boobed Jordan eating a witchetty grub on prime-time TV that sparked a conversation with my children about food, body image and happy eating. I guess I should be grateful. At least it was already a topic of discussion before life got even more confusing. They seem to have been bombarded with mixed messages and strange behaviour around food ever since.
I mean, what is a child or adolescent to make of this? Earlier this month, on the day the Royal College of Physicians called for a national strategy to tackle obesity, my eldest son and I found ourselves sitting before his French teacher at his secondary school parents’ evening. She smiled, to his evident relief. He’s doing fine, she said. In fact he’s near the top of the class on chocolate points.
Next morning I found a newsletter from my youngest son’s primary school in his bag. Free fruit to be given to all pupils. Great. It’s part of a healthy eating campaign, to coincide with a total ban on sweet and salty snacks. Uh-oh.
Then my 12-year-old daughter’s friend arrived so they could catch the school bus together. She was early, and I was making toast. Would she like some? No thanks, she doesn’t “do” breakfast. She doesn’t want a big bum. I tell her I’ve seen more fat on a chip.
We live in strange times, and it’s doing strange things to our children’s bodies and to their relationships with food and with people. Childhood obesity figures are soaring, but so are anorexia and other eating disorders among children and adolescents, though these seem to have fallen off the media agenda. What and how our children eat is making too many of them too fat, too thin, too sad. And myriad well-intentioned “health” messages are backfiring or are being undermined by adult behaviour.
This matters, so while eminent physicians and government committees chew over whether, when and how to implement national “healthy eating” strategies, there’s also an urgent need to review what we already know about social attitudes and children’s behaviour around food.
Take tricks and treats — it seems that my son’s French teacher is not alone. A very non-scientific survey among friends and colleagues with school-age children reveals a good number of teachers offering sweets, as incentive or reward, even within “healthy eating” schools.So, as is often the case, what adults are doing contradicts what children are told to do. But before we tut too loudly about teachers’ tricks, we might also take a look at the messages that we give our children at home. Hands up how many of us have told our children “eat your carrots, then you can have your pudding”. Thus we convey ideas about which food is a chore and a bore, and which is delicious and presented as evidence of “goodness”.
Even more worrying is what adults communicate by offering children sweets as a substitute for emotional support, perhaps a chocolate if they stop crying, or an ice cream if they’ve not been picked for the school team. These children need a cuddle or for us to listen to what’s wrong, far more than they need treats. They are hungry for emotional contact, not chocolate. Once made, that link between emotional comfort and food is a tough one to snap.
And forbidding some foods doesn’t help because bans backfire — the prohibited foods tend to become those that children most desire. While researching the links between adult behaviour and children’s eating for a new book, Raising Happy Children, I discovered a study by Dr Gillian Harris at the the feeding clinic at Birmingham Children ’s Hospital, involving children with cystic fibrosis.
These children require a very high calorie diet, so their parents tend not to offer them salads but encourage them to eat as many chocolate bars and other high calorie sweets as possible. When asked by researchers to record their favourite foods, topping the children’s list were cucumber and lettuce. Chocolate came near the bottom. The food that was withheld had become the most desirable, while the foods parents most actively encouraged were the things they didn’ t want.
At home and school, if adults act as food police and outlaw certain foods, they are likely to invest the forbidden item with playground cachet (my son’s headteacher, please take note). They also risk food becoming a battleground. And once children start to use food to wind up concerned adults or, more worryingly, as a means to express defiance or distress, encouraging them to eat well becomes far harder. In general, it’s more “healthy” simply not to have junk so readily available than to elevate its status to favoured weapon in a battle of wills.
Banning aggressive marketing of junk during children’s TV is, of course, another matter. The Government may be choosing to ignore research findings as it attempts to soothe and schmooze the food industry into social conscience, but respected evidence and common sense suggest that an advertising ban will reduce pester power and children’s consumption of luminous drinks and other nasties.
And “not in front of the children” should also apply to mention of the “D” word. Dr Atkins, the originator of the wildly popular eponymous diet was 18 stone (114kg) when he died. Why does that not surprise me? But while the pendulum of weight loss and gain now experienced by millions of adults is worrying, our cultural obsession with “dieting” may have even more disastrous consequences for thenext generation.
Public information campaigns about obesity have so far failed to make it very clear that calorie-reduction diets are not suitable for children unless supervised by a qualified dietitian or medical practitioner. Sure, eat less fattening foods and take more exercise as a family if you are worried about your child’s weight, but try not to make a big deal of it all.
Food should be enjoyable, not something used to “punish” or “reward”. Children who are encouraged to “slim” or who pick up adult anxieties around dieting are more vulnerable to eating problems as they grow. The roots of conditions such as anorexia and bulimia are complex, but recent studies have indicated that children who diet, even moderately, are five times more likely to develop a serious eating disorder later in life. If they diet heavily, they are 18 times more likely to develop a disorder than children who don’t.
And just as dieting has adverse effects, so too have worthy lectures about healthy food. Have you ever heard a child say “yum!” when told something’s good for them? Neither have clinical researchers at University College London, who reported that children in their study rated food described as “healthy” as less nice than exactly the same food without the worthy message.
Health messages and information are important for parents, but can be a call to rebellion for anyone under 16. So if you pack your child’s lunchbox full of nutritional goodies, let your children see you eating them yourself and tell them you’ve chosen them because they’re delicious, not because they’re packed with vitamins or are a wonderful source of zinc.
Maybe “healthy” food campaigns should take another look at children’s behaviour and the effect of their own marketing slogans if they really want to help turn around the eating habits of the nation.
The new updated edition of Raising Happy Children, by Jan Parker and Jan Stimpson, is published on March 1 (Hodder Mobius, £12.99)
