Be a Rebel: Join Friends of Bugs Bunny
As my trusty Otter boat chugs into Sluts brygga (End Dock) the children wave at one another with excitement. “Hej! Hej!” my children shout to their friends who are hopping up and down on the dock, which fortunately has just been reinforced. Coming to our place is always something of an adventure. The mother of the hopping children stands behind them looking sheepish. “Hej!”, I shout to her offering some islander hospitality.
As the children board the boat, she reveals the source of her sheepishness which has been hiding behind her. She pulls out the great black garbage bag and opens it so that I can view the contents. “Egon’s grandmother gave him these for his birthday”, she explains looking up at me with a do-you-want-them-or-not type of look. I look into the bag and find that it contains a sea of pink, red, green, white and orange sweets. The sugary smell is intoxicating. I glance over at Egon, a visibly overweight 12-year-old and pluck up the courage to reply, ” thanks so much but I really cannot take these with me”. The mother pulls back the black bag as though to hide illegal drugs from an unwilling customer. As we speed off in the Otter, with Egon in tow, I look back and see his mother quietly placing the black bag into the back of a pickup truck parked at the dock. She looks around to see whether anyone has noticed her leaving the bag there and, certain that no one has, hops into her car and drives off.
On the island, Egon and the other children live a goody-free life. It’s a little strange at first but after a while no one seems to think about it. There is a bowl of apples and a bowl of peeled carrots on the kitchen counter at the beginning of the day. At day’s end the bowls are empty. No one complains and dinner cannot come too soon.
It’s Friday evening and I’m in the supermarket shopping for the weekend. The vegetables and fruits are ironically adjacent to the great plastic troughs of colored sugar that parents are actively assisting their young children to dig into. It’s the end of the week and in Sweden time to reward the children for another five harrowing over-scheduled days. Tired parents let the kids rip loose. Don’t they deserve it after all?
For as long as I have been a parent, I have always wondered about this system of rewarding children. Today I wonder more than ever. In an age when child illnesses related to poor diet are sky-rocketing and when we need urgently to think about the energy required to produce the food that we eat, are sweets really a sane way of rewarding our kids? Instead of standing at the goody counter of a crowded, noisy supermarket on a Friday night, why not give the most nutritious form of energy that you can: your time? It takes a little courage and yes, you have to be a rebel in today’s goody-flooded world (be ready to be named the world’s most unbelievable party-pooper from time to time), but your kids will love you for it in the end.
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For more sane thoughts on food check the current issue of www.nordicwellbeing.com.
Wait until your children escape from the island. They will get all they want then.
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Keep fighting the good fight Julie. The lessons and behaviour that kids learn when young they will usually return to, even if they experiment for a bit when older.
Mind you, I was always told that most of the goodness in vegetables was in the skin or just under, so we should wash and not not peel carrots ?
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Hi worcesterman,
It is true that many of the nutritional benefits of fruits and vegetables lie in or right under the skin. The big question is usually where your fruits and vegetables come from and whether the skin is covered with chemicals or not. These days you can usually purchase organic carrots and if they really are fresh and good, the skin tends to be rather thin and fine too consume once you have washed them. You can of course also wash your fruits and vegetables by thoroughly scrubbing them in lemon juice and water in order to remove residual chemicals. Unfortunately, most of us do not take the time to do that. There are obvious examples where the skin is not too tasty (e.g. beets or lemons).
Agree with you about kids returning to the basics that they learned earlier in life. We do not live on our summer island full time any longer and the kids don’t seem to be much attracted to those disastrous bags of colored sugar.
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My son is almost 16, and rarely wants sweets – I gave him fruit and vegetables right from the start, or dried fruit. Now, he can just about cope with the sweetness of a hot chocolate, but cannot bear it with marshmallows on the top. He is often given sweets as a present, always seems pleased at the time, but never finishes them – much to his father’s delight; he has a very sweet tooth!
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