Dina Rose - Its Not About the Broccoli: Three Habits to Teach Your Kids for a Lifetime of Healthy Eating

How Did We Get Here?

W hen I was five months pregnant, my mother died. She was sixty-five years old and weighed just over three hundred pounds. Although she had not been obese for her entire life, she had struggled with her weight ever since I could remember. Food was her obsession, her frenemy, and her distraction from pain. It was her lifeline as well as the noose around her neck. While I may never know the extent to which my mothers overeating caused her death, I do know it caused her years of distress.

Although my mother tried to protect me from her demons, quite a few of them transferred down to me: a poor body image, out-of-control snacking, and, more often than I care to admit, a ravenous desire for sweets. When my daughter was born, I was painfully aware that I wanted my child to have a better food life. I wanted her to be able to nourish herself and have a happy relationship with food.

Many of my friends had the same goals. Like me, they didnt always have the easiest time eating right. Some had grown up with too much junk. Others were forced to clean their plates. And many of us learned to comfort ourselves with cookies. As adults, we all worked hard to approach food differently. We read books about nutrition and health; we sought out healthy recipes; we even ate our vegetables! Whats more, we tried not to go diving for the ice cream at the first sign of stress.

When we had families of our own, we told ourselves we wanted our children to eat well from the beginning. Of course we wanted good nutrition for them. Although experts dont always agree on the best way to feed kids, we could easily discern the basics: Kids need fresh, wholesome foods, including fruits and vegetables, quality protein, and whole grains, along with milk or some other source of calcium. But we wanted more for our children. We wanted them to know the difference between physical and emotional hunger, to be able to stop before theyd devoured the entire bag of chips. We also wanted them to try all kinds of foodsMexican, Indian, Japanese, Thai!so they could join us on our food adventures.

But I noticed that when my friends actually had kids of their own, something changed. The parents were shocked, then flattened, by how hard it was to feed their families well. Some of them even described their familys food struggles in the language of combat: Dinnertime is a war zone. We are waving the white flag on whole grains. We are going to wrestle some calcium into Ethan if it kills us all.

Mealtimes were stressful events, with parents begging their children to eat and the children whining and rejecting their parents entreaties. Over the years, it was easy to predict what most of these kids would end up eating at any given meal: pizza, noodles, chicken nuggets, or bagels, along with a fruit juice or sweetened drink. If food really was a battle, it was clear that the parents were losing.

Despite their lofty intentions, most of the parents I knew were raising their children to be picky, chicken-finger-lovin, emotional eaters who saw food as an arena for conflict and resistance. This was precisely the situation wed all wanted to avoid. What had happened, and how could I prevent this misery around my own table?

How do you teach children to eat right? I was consumed with figuring this out. Because Im a sociologist, I was naturally oriented to thinking more about how parents shape their childrens behavior than about nutrition. But when I started studying this question, I discovered something I wasnt prepared for, something surprising. In fact, it was completely counterintuitive: The more that parents focus on nutrition, the worse their kids are likely to eat.

I discovered something else, too: Theres an alternative to the nutrition mindset, one thatironicallyis more effective at teaching kids to become healthy eaters. Its an alternative that parents describe as both doable and revolutionary. But Im getting ahead of myself. To explain, I need to tell you a little more about myself and about my unusual perspective on food and eating.

H ABITS AND H EALTHY E ATING

When my daughter started eating solids, I used the tools of my profession, sociology, to teach her how to eat right. Back then, I was working in criminology; my research focused on families living in high-crime neighborhoods. In particular, I looked at how families sometimes managed to raise their children to become law-abiding citizens even when everything in their immediate environment was working against them. Other sociologists I know examined things like how marriage choices affect children or how kids learn about gender roles. But one of the key concepts that ties all these topics together is socialization: how groups of peoplefamilies includedpass on their values and behaviors to the next generation and how children repeat those behaviors until they become habits. (In sociology speak, we think of habits as behaviors that become so routine we do them without thinking about it.)