The American Child’s Amazing Shrinking Palate by Anna Soref –

It’s a scene from many an American dinner table: Mom and dad are enjoying typical dinner fare, say a piece of fish with rice and steamed green beans. At the same table, Brother and Sister are dipping chicken nuggets and ‘tater tots in ketchup.

When did kid cuisine become a norm in America? When did we start believing that children require “kid food” just like pets require pet food?

Growing up in the 1970s I had SpaghettiOs and Kraft mac and cheese, but it was the exception, not the norm. Every parent is entitled to shortcuts on busy nights. That’s not what I am talking about. I am referring to the belief that kids can’t eat “grownup” food, they require “kid food”—carbohydrates, sweets and animal protein, milk and orange cheeses and for the adventurous, a narrow assortment of fruits (bananas, apples oranges) and vegetables (peas, carrots and corn).

In watching parents through the years (I have an 8-year old) I’ve witnessed those who subscribe to this belief system. “Oh, he won’t eat anything green” or “We have to make him a separate meal every night, he wouldn’t touch what we have.”

When my daughter was a toddler, I watched the majority of parents give their kids the same tastes and textures repeatedly, primarily in the forms of salted and sweetened carbs—think Goldfish and Honeynut Cheerios. The savvy parents doled out organic versions of these.

I recently spoke with Dr. Alan Greene who has done research on our kids’ dwindling palates. He found that there is a 36-month window when we can imprint (yes, like ducks) on certain foods. The key though, is that it takes six to 10 exposures of a food to imprint; in his research he found that 94 percent of American families gave up by the fifth try.

So what’s the take-away here for retailers? In addition to offering healthy convenience foods for kids, offer family meal cooking classes, bring in speakers who can discuss toddler nutrition and stock quality books that address the importance of a varied diet for children.

My first thought, “Wow, he is a great reader!”

My second thought, “Wow, the advertisers already have him.”

I knew that it was time to act. It was time to defend my children from being told what they needed to buy in order to be happy.

Then I remembered a trick that I learned from a Tony Campolo talk on Greed. It was time to start teaching my children to laugh at commercials.

Our first adventure in laughing at advertisements was simply perfect.

Our children were watching Veggie Tales on live TV, when a commercial for a “Prayer Cross” began to play. This product was an overpriced piece of cheap jewelry with the words of the Lords Prayer on it. Yet this product claimed to “help you pray to God” and to “bring you peace and hope.”

It was time to pull out the laughter (Profanity was my first reaction, but not as helpful.).

“Kids that is so funny! Do we need to buy jewelry to talk to God? No way!” “Ha, Ha, Ha!”

“We do not need that ‘prayer cross’ to get peace and hope from God!” “Ha, Ha, Ha!” “That is SO SILLY!”

The kids quickly joined in on the fun at laughing at the commercial!

We proceeded to expand the game to commercials for breakfast cereals, toys, and movies.

We now enjoy a lot of laughter at the expense of ridiculous advertisements.

Jim and Robyn and there two children live in Wauwatosa, WI. In addition to laughing at commercials, they enjoy discussing theology and culture, playing outside, and eating ice cream together. Jim is an associate pastor at Elmbrook with a focus on emerging adults.
Jim’s Blog: http://jimvining.wordpress.com
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jimvining
Twitter: https://twitter.com/jimvining

It was a simple idea, something for the season of Advent that she probably found in one of the church magazines or devotionals we had. She took a little woven basket that could serve as a manger for a doll-sized baby Jesus and put it in the living room. Then she got a hold of some straw and set it in a pile nearby. (We were living in Southern California at the time so I can’t imagine where she found straw!) Finally, she called the family together and invited us to “make a bed for the baby Jesus” by adding straw to the manger, one piece at a time. You were allowed to add one piece every time you did something kind for someone else. There was just one catch: your good deeds had to be anonymous. No one was to know what you had done. It was just between you and God.

Just between me… and God.

Something crystallized that moment in my memory. I can almost see myself standing still, stopped short in my mental tracks by a sudden new awareness. Faith had crosed over into my interior life. If I could have a secret shared just between God and me, then that meant that even when I was alone… I wasn’t alone. Someone was there, and we could…. talk.

As an adult, I’ve asked myself just what it is that I experience as a believer. What do I “get” out of having faith in Jesus that makes a difference in my life? One answer I keep returning to is the fundamental sense that when I’m alone, I’m not alone. There is someone there. It may well be that my mother was the one who first brought me that awareness.

Now, I have a daughter who is twelve and another who is six. I had big plans last Advent of sharing this little faith practice with them. (Oh well, maybe next year.) But yesterday something came up that just may strike the same chord.

My twelve year old didn’t want to go to the Ash Wednesday service. Normally she’s quite happy to go to worship, but this day she’d had late after school activities, still had homework and chores yet to do, and really needed a shower. She just didn’t want to go out again. Cold she just stay home?

I thought about it, and for a variety of reasons I said yes. But then it occurred to me to encourage her to pray by herself after she finished her shower.

By herself. I wondered…

She agreed, and that was how we left it. I took her sister with me and she had the house to herself for a little while. She was certainly accustomed to praying. We pray extemporaneously as a family at meals and at bedtime. But this may have been the first time that she prayed “alone.”

I checked with her about it later that evening and she had spent some time in prayer. It sounded pretty normal. She didn’t report any great revelations and I didn’t want to sugest that she was expected to, so that was that.

Will she emerge into adulthood with a sense, as I did, of the inward companionship of the loving God, as near as her own thoughts?

I don’t know, but I’m hoping. And praying.

Since the birth of our daughter, maybe even before, I’ve been thinking about homeschooling.

A little background to give you perspective is that I’m a trained public school teacher. And having worked with some extremely educated, creative, and indefatigable people, I have nothing but respect for the profession. At first I wasn’t sure why I wanted to homeschool, or what it was that I felt had to change. It was just something at the back of my mind that felt “off”. So, I started reading, regurgitating what I read to my husband, and then reading some more. At first I didn’t even know what I was looking for. I picked up everything that had homeschooling in the subject. I read about Maria Montessori, the Waldorf method, Unschooling, Charlotte Mason, and Classical education. Trying to sift and filter what I thought was valuable, what I agreed with, what I disagreed with and trying to come up with my own philosophy of education.

And the question kept coming up in my mind, why? Why with so many choices out there now (i.e. charter schools, magnet schools, etc…) was I doing this. Why was I committing our family to a lot of work and hassle when there are highly trained professional out there who we’re already paying with our taxes to do this important job?

To answer this for myself I had to look at our life and the changes we’d been progressively making since our marriage in 2000. Seven years ago, my spirituality manifested itself in reading my Bible, praying (when I could figure out what to say), going to church, and treating others nice. Now obviously that was all good, but there was a void a big void. If that was all that my faith called me to, then Christ’s sacrifice wasn’t worth much. There had to be more, and more in a big way! We had to be alternative beings, we had to live alternative lives, lives that when against the flow, not a ‘niceified’ version of mainstream culture. It said so right there in the Bible I’d been reading. So as a couple we read and talked. We talked about simplicity, about community, about solidarity with the poor, about spiritual consequences of ecological practices and made decisions based on what we came to believe. And the point of all this is we are still searching and refining, tossing and tweaking and our children are an integral part of this process.

So, to get back to education, if our family believes in living alternatively, and being alternative beings in this current consumer, me-driven culture, and passing that on to our children, then these years of our children’s initial formation are important. If we chose to send our children to public school at the age of five, for six to seven hours a day 180 days a year the struggle, I feel, would be an uphill one.

Now, I’m reading this and realizing that it’s sounding a bit holier-than-thou, and that’s not how I feel at all. So let me say just a bit more. I wrote this to share our story, our path, one that we think meets the unique needs our daughter. This is not our call to abandon the world at large, isolate ourselves in our home, and ‘fill’ our children with what we believe. It’s one way of giving them a chance to see that there is another way to live. We want to teach our daughter, and later our son, to think for themselves. To be an active participant in their own education, not passive receptacles for society to ‘fill up’. Part of the process may be to later send them to public school, I honestly don’t know and I’m not worried about it. We’re making this up as we go along.