Time for kids to learn manners away from home
DEAR CAROLYN: Who should get to choose what food the grandkids eat when they’re at the grandparents’ house? The grandparents think the kids should eat healthier, so they provide healthy options and limit snacks. The kids don’t want to eat the healthy meals because the food is different from what they’re used to. The kids obviously want food they’re familiar with, and want to snack because they’re not eating as much at meals. They’re also melting down from time to time because they’re off their schedule and eating less than usual. Best-case scenario, the kids would have been exposed to and would enjoy a wider variety of foods, but here we are.
I believe in providing healthy and a few tasty — less healthy — options for people of all ages, and letting them choose what they want to eat and how much. Food is meant to be enjoyed, in moderation and in autonomy. I grew up in a different culture where all celebrations involve lots of food.
While the food may seem healthier at the grandparents’,
I don’t like the amount of control the grandparents hold over the food for everyone else. Isn’t the point of a holiday to eat, drink and be merry?
Do you have a food solution for when families of different generations and geographies come together that could help keep everyone sane?
— Anonymous DEAR READER: You already have one. You serve what you want to serve on your turf, and they serve what they want on their turf, and your kids learn to adjust to the differences.
As the parent, you do have more say in your kids’ upbringing than their grandparents do, of course. I don’t like the whiff of judgmental
intrusiveness, either, in the grandparents’ “think[ing] the kids should eat healthier.” However, insisting your kids get junk snacks at someone else’s house strikes me as the definition of holding too much control over food.
You also shrug off broader exposure as something that
ideally would have happened already — “but here we are” — when that process is exactly what you’re describing! It’s just in progress vs. being complete. If you’re serious about variety as a virtue, then introduce some grand-foods palatably, incrementally, at home.
Now. Would I handle food the same way their grandparents do, staunchly refusing to please the kids? Probably not. But I might, depending on what definition we’re using for “healthier.” It’s a stretchy word.
Fortunately, the specific foods don’t change the answer significantly as long as the menu doesn’t include known allergens, obvious gross-outs (I see you, liver) or forbidden foods. (I feel a need to express that too much kale from the grandparents is a welcome change from the usual high-fructose excess.)
If your kids are physically, medically or religiously able to eat what the grands serve and simply choose not to, then you have a straightforward path: Recognize it’s not your place to parachute into the grandparents’ house with pallets of cheesy poofs. If their nutritional orthodoxy strains their bond with the kids, then that’s a natural consequence the grands can perceive and address for themselves.
“Best-case,” though, and arguably the inevitable case, your kids will learn all kinds of things from the food gap: how different people and cultures express themselves in different homes, how to default to gratitude when someone goes to the trouble to provide them with healthy meals, how to cope when the world doesn’t bend to their will — all previously known as having some manners — and how to eat when they’re hungry.
Meltdowns are bad, but entitlement is so profoundly worse.