Hide Your Cookies, Here Comes Another Teachable Moment
By Sheri Reed

Parenting young children is funny--the way you’re forced to provide teachable black and white moments for your kids in all the gray areas of life. Without a moment’s notice, your kids will come to you with Life’s Biggest Questions--usually while you’re standing soaking wet on the bath mat or scooping the very overdue cat box. And, of course, we want to roll out an enlightened answer, describing the world, not as it exists necessarily, but as we hope our kids will see it, approach it, and ultimately, shape it to be. It’s also nice if you can deliver Life’s Biggest Answers in a Technicolor production that inspires excitement and produces clear, infallible direction for approaching life and its unexpected challenges. In other words, it’s good to have a fiction-writing background, as it’s best not to tell the truth. The truth is what we must save up for the cynical, gloomy period of teen angst.
Currently, in our house, when it comes to the big discussions around food, I try to narrow it down to simple discussions of healthy versus not healthy and, more and more, of real versus processed food. We also talk a little bit about the marketing strategies behind Big Name Foods. My two-year-old son is still too young to understand any of this, and my oldest son is barely six. With such young children, it just doesn’t make sense yet to get into daunting topics like industrialized food, modern nutritional science, dieting, growth hormones, beef recalls, gluttony, starvation, poverty, eating disorders, or even questionable school lunch programs. At age six, at least here in mainstream America, there’s still a little time for hope.
So this year, when Clyde started kindergarten, we began the practice of having him make his own lunch to take to school every day. We’re trying to not only promote independence and save ourselves five or ten minutes a night but also to subtly teach him about food and the work and knowledge it takes to put fairly well-rounded meals together every day. We hope that daily lunch-making, while small, can serve as a more long-term teaching tool.
One day during the first week of school, Clyde came home and said, “Mom, guess what?”
“What?” I answered.
“Today, at school, I opened my lunch bag, and I had just a mayonnaise sandwich.”
He forgot to put the cheese on, but what was funnier is that he didn’t even realize at first that he had anything to do with his sandwich’s cheeselessness. He wasn’t used to shouldering this kind of responsibility.
“You forgot to put the cheese on?” I asked.
“Yeah, I guess I did.” His eyes opened wide, as he recalled putting his own lunch together the night before. “I guess I better pay more attention.”
The week after the holiday break, I pulled his lunch bag out of the fridge to put it in his backpack. It felt pretty light, so I took a peek inside. There was a sandwich but no drink and no piece of fruit, which we try to insist upon. Instead there was a miniature candy bar from his Christmas stash. We’ve been very clear with him about his not taking candy to school. Needless to say, I was a little peeved.
“What’s this?” I questioned. “How many times have you taken your Christmas candy to school?”
“Never!” he said, but he can’t lie very well yet. “Uh . . . once . . . uh . . . I took it once.”
I stared him in the face.
“But I threw it away.”
I stared some more. My eyes were probably bulging out of their sockets at this point.
“I mean, once. I took it once and ate it once.”
“Okay,” I said, mostly relieved that the lies didn’t stick more than the candy offense.
“I know,” his eyes rolled, “it’s not good for my body.”
“Well, it’s not bad to eat candy sometimes,” I said, remembering, guiltily the cookies I had for breakfast. (Cookies are just so good with the first cup of coffee in the morning.) “Your dad and I just don’t want you taking candy to school. Candy’s a treat, not part of your everyday lunch.” (Or breakfast, I thought.)
In both of these moments, I could see Clyde beginning to take small steps toward understanding his personal responsibility for his own eating habits. He suddenly could see that his actions and his choices around food were becoming his own. It’s so awesome when you actually get to see this kind of revelation and growth in action in your kids. What wasn’t so awesome was the realization that at 38, I’m still realizing and trying to achieve the same things and the same notion of responsibility. I’m still learning that the only one in charge of what I eat is me.
This kind of parental consciousness is part of what makes parenting hard. In moments like this, we are forced to look at our flaws and inconsistencies and hypocrisies, in ways that you might not imagine. Your choices, in some ways, become your kids’ realities--even if just for a short while in their younger years. Your choices temporarily make up your child’s beliefs and understanding of the world. In other words, for a parent, it’s totally high pressure.
But then again, as I try to remind myself and even my kids when I can, life is a never-ending ladder of learning and relearning. As much as we can, we strive to be our best selves and, when it comes to food in particular, to make the best choices we can. And some days we get busy and distracted, and we mess up and make ourselves a mayonnaise sandwich. And other days we knowingly sneak candy into our own lunchboxes, as if we can somehow sneak something past our own knowledge of what’s best for us.
But some other days, under the powers that be, we also get to make choices we’re not capable of making. Some days we do everything right without even trying. We make and enjoy nutritious meals. We share fresh food with one another around the family table and go for a long walk after dinner. We once again get to see what the good life is all about. And that makes everything worth it, even all the slipups--past and future.
After a busy school day morning, strewn with hour-long minutes of candy begging (somehow another box of goodies has made it into our house), Clyde, who was supposed to be making his lunch, walked back to my office. I managed to slide my secret breakfast cookie under a piece of paper before he started up again, “Mommy, can I . . .”
“No.”
“But . . .”
“En! Oh!”
“But Mom . . .”
“You . . . may . . . not . . . have . . . any . . . candy . . . in . . . your . . . lunch. None, nada, zip, no!”
“But . . .”
“Shhh.”
“Mom, I wanted to ask for a vegetable. I want to put some little carrots in my lunch.”
The tension in my neck slipped away, and I exhaled with great relief. I turned toward Clyde, my sweet six-year-old boy who is growing into his own person, one perfectly capable of making life’s “right” choices now and again. And once more, I got to see that we’re going to make it. By the seat of our pants, and with some sneaky sweets here and there but make it nonetheless.