Teeth

Teeth. Sigh. Is there anything more tedious than brushing them, flossing them, buffing them, glossing them? (Sorry, I got possessed by the spirit of Dr Seuss for a moment there…)

But ya gotta do it. I am the unproud bearer of yellow ones because I didn’t look after them as a teenager. I am missing a few due to decay and have fillings in others. So as I raise my boys, it’s important to me to have them eat right and look after their teeth.

But important to me and important to them are two different things. I don’t know whether I’ve talked about the difference between my 2 boys; I often sing the theme from the Odd Couple as they pass by.

Oldest Son is kinda like Felix, but with a surfer hair style and much better dress sense. And youngest son is of course Oscar the slob. Oh, he doesn’t mean to be, but neat hair, unstained clothes and having space to walk across the bedroom floor just aren’t priorities when there are so many other things to focus on, like daydreaming, daydreaming and his favorite passtime daydreaming.

So guess which one has trouble with his teeth? Yep: Oscar. Sigh. But sometimes the more you push, or manipluate or trick the kids with fancy psychology, the more they just resist. The tooth debate is in recess at the moment at my house (during which he’ll probably surprise me and get out the electric toothbrush to start buffing…)

Today I came across some helpful material on the Raising Children Network here in Oz. The first item I’ll link to is a video about eating habits and tooth care which features a nice cameo from Russell Crowe. (What a great voice!). The second is an article about School-age dental care. Both have links off to other topics in the series.

WARNING DAD JOKE: So don’t give your kids’ dental health the brushoff; go check out these links.

Should the Government Ban Junk Food Ads?

There’s an idea being strongly advocated at the moment that junk food ads be banned during children’s TV viewing time (in Australia, this is). One aspect of the debate I’m hearing/reading in the media today is whether or not the government should be the one banning it between 7 am and 9 pm.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority is rejecting these calls for a ban. Apparently, the potential effects on their hip pocket are far scarier to them than the increasing rates of childhood obesity and the widespread behavioral problems amongst our kids and teenagers.

But maybe I’m just another cynical Gen X when I say things like that. I invite your response.

As the Sydney-Morning Herald article (the link above) points out:

The media authority needs to give considered responses to a few basic questions:

1. Does marketing work? If not, then they should let universities know so that it is no longer taught, and tell companies so they can lay off their expensive marketing departments.

2. Does marketing junk food to children increase their consumption of these foods? If not, then they need to tell food marketers not to waste their billions of marketing dollars targeting kids to do just that.

3. Does a high intake of calorie-laden food and beverages lead to unhealthy weight gain? If not, then scientists need to bury that particular mountain of evidence.

I think they’re great questions. Because an admission that marketing works is an admission that  marketing strongly affects kids’ appetites for junk food which in turn means that if junk food is bad for kids, the advertisers/producers feel fine about harming children to line their own pockets.

Now I don’t want to be a hypocrite here. I eat my share of bad food too. But I’m also fighting an uphill battle for my kids (though it feels like with my kids some times) for moderation, for their food pyramids to have junkfood in the tiny space at the top, not occupying the larger portions of their diet further down the pyramid. And I want my boys to enjoy TV without being indoctrinated by advertising which basically says “if it feels good, do it.”  If kids swallow that message hook-line-sinker, it’s no stretch of the imagination to believe it makes it even harder to say no to other things in the future that seem to feel good in the initial stages like binge-drinking, drug-taking, sex in the backseat of cars …

I invite your response.

One stream of thought in the debate is that parents should stop blaming the advertisers and “just say no” to their children. Well, ok. There’s a point there; I say no to my kids apparently often enough for one of them to accuse me occasionally of being the worst dad in the world. ["You won't let me eat a bag of lollies (candy) right before I go to bed??!! You're the worst Dad in the world!!!]

But let’s be honest. Monkey see, monkey do. Any cursory study of the development of the human brain reveals that in childhood (especially early childhood when many habits are formed), the brain is a sponge and the child often learns by seeing and copying.

Kids are swamped in advertising that shows them people being made happy by eating crap. If you said no, no, no to a kid about eating junk, and limited it to a relatively healthy frequency,  a lot of kids are still so indoctrinated by marketing media (and the prevalence of the junk in the school yard) that they’ll find a way to get it, even if they have to steal 50 cents here and there, sneak around to their friends’ places after school or guilt-trip their grandparents into providing it.

I invite a response to that thought.

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In other news, still trying to get time to fix the problems with the site. Hope you’ll perservere with me.

Other posts:

• Still Loading
• Feed me, Seymour – FEED ME!
• Parents Put Food Marketing Practises on Trial

Feed me, Seymour – FEED ME!

Over at 100 Bloggers April’s theme is Proper Care and Feeding. There’s some great posts about nurturing ideas and about maintaining essential commitments.

It made me think more “prosaic” thoughts about what Generation Z kids get fed literally.

[No, it's not going to be a rant about childhood obesity. Yes, the word prosaic is somewhat pretentious, as is the word pretentious].

My oldest son eats almost anything. He’s a little like The Blob from the old horror film: a relentless eating machine. Oh, sure he’s slow getting started in the morning, but as the day wears on, his appetite moves up through them gears until even the dog is running for cover.

He’ll eat: all vegies except onions and peppers (fair enough!); any kind of meat including kangaroo (although he complains that steak is too hard to cut and doesn’t want it! Jeez!); most breakfast cereals (once in the morning, once in the afternoon and once again in the evening); and of course almost every junkfood known to child-kind.

3 days into the recent school holidays (and four days after our grocery shopping night) i go to the fridge to make lunch for both boys. Nothing. No bread, barely any cheese, no tinned food, no nothing.

“Where the heck did it all go?” I ask myself … and then – like Jerry Seinfeld realising Newman is behind some calamity - I hiss “the boy”.

The most annoying thing is at 11, he has the body most surfers aspire to complete with six-pack abdomen. I look at a cheeseburger and my belt pops its buckle. (double Jeez!)

Youngest son? He actually eats the right way round if you listen to dieticians: big breakfast and then less as the day goes on, so that dinner is problematic for getting him to eat anything (besides dessert which – let’s face it – relies less on appetite than it does on sugar-addiction).

He’ll eat: Brocolli but but no other vegetables (unless you are prepared to weather the emotional storm of forcing him to eat them, which we try to do); cereal and bread (but not toast); apples (if the moon is full or nearly full); honey but not jam (unless it’s the third Wednesday of the month, where this is reversed); oh, potatoes sure (if the wind is blowing from the south); corn (if it’s just the right shade of yellow); a nibble of meat; and if you serve him a fillet of any fish he’ll gobble up the entire thing (but tuna is yukky).

Up until now, Youngest Son has despised oranges. Yesterday his teacher asked his 2nd-grade class to bring an orange cut into quarters. Now he declares he wants oranges every day (yeah, like that’s gonna last!)

Here’s two questions that plague caring sentient parents everywhere (the non-sentient uncaring ones have different questions):

1. Is my kid getting enough nutrition? (e.g. is a diet of rice, wheat flakes, milk and oreos enough?)
2. How do I stop my kids eating so much junk? (junk = the salt + sugar + fats + chemical additives that seem to give even the most well-adjusted children double chins or irregular bouts of homicidal rage followed by superhuman feats of acrobatics)

To question 1, my wife and I agree that if the kid is healthy and not pre-anorexic, let em alone. As long as the diet doesn’t consist entirely of oreos, but contains grains protein and some stuff with vitamins somewhere – what’s the problem? Who says they have to eat like a horse? That’ll come with adolescence or pre-adolescence. I’m open to correction of course; I’m not a nutritionist. But Youngest Son doesn’t seem any less healthy for missing out on most of the food on his dinner plate.

To question 2, I laugh uncontrollably. “Stop them??” I exclaim: “Good luck with that!”

But, seriously folks, it’s a deep concern. It’s like a quote from one of my favourite books on parenting (which I won’t reference because they won’t give me permission to print any of their words – officially – the buggers!): “The child’s job is to test the boundaries. The parent’s job is to resist.”

Good news huh?

But if you care, you’ll just take a deep breath and control the junk food intake, without denying them the odd Happy Meal or Oreo … well, alright the odd 6 Oreos! Ya can’t stop at just one – hope you’re reading Oreo Company: see my contact details to get the advertising cheque ready…)

And heck! We need to find ways to become less dependent on processed foods for our own sakes as much as our kids…

…but that’s for a more serious blog…