PhilosYphia

For many, a daily Oprah episode signals the beginning of a session of pleasure, a desperate excitement that lasts for an hour and then melts into a lathered puddle of women lazily lounging around on the steps outside of her studio, grabbing cigarettes and moaning about how the sparks flew and lit up their eyes for the better part of an afternoon. To some it’s a satisfying event; for others, she leaves us ridden hard and hung up without a vigorous towelling-off. Not even the “O” word in magazine format can possibly wrench us from the idea that whatever just happened on that TV probably cost us a few tenths of our soul.

A couple of days ago, I managed to gather that Jessica Seinfeld, wife of famed and funny Jerry, was on Her Majesty’s program to promote her new cookbook about how to hide vegetables within foods that children have naturally found easy to stuff down their maws in large quantities, thus avoiding a task that most parents have found to be unpleasant at best. As many have found, broccoli would go down a lot easier in the younger generation if it was coated with frosting, carbonated, and deep fried in a rich, caramel sauce.

So, Jessica’s method of circumnavigating this parental mountain is to simply whip all manner of plant material into the consistency of Slim-Fast and incorporate it in the mix for any number of foods that are more acceptable to the refined and delicate palates of children. Ha-HA! Take that, ye denizens of culinary hell, we have you pegged now! Enjoy those chicken nuggets, but beware — they’re chock-full of nutrition! Naturally, Oprah loves this shit and presented it as God’s own nectar and the saviour of cooking-frustrated parents everywhere. The rash of people showing up at Wal*mart that afternoon to purchase a Cuisinart must have been impressive.

Does anyone else besides me see a problem with this entire idea? The consuming of various vegetables may not be the most memorable experience for a child, but it certainly isn’t an event that should be traumatic or detrimental to their development as a human being. The show had some parents and children on there that threw huge tantrums about eating veggies and the exasperated parental units lamented that their days were filled with the screams of their tortured offspring who were being crippled by the carrots, bled dry by the beets, and ostracized by
the onions!ostracized by the onions!

Give me a break.

All this points to is a lack of boot-in-ass-itis, and the children are both infected and carriers of the disease. Eating vegetables, as well as other foods of varying types, is part of learning to be a discerning human being who has the ability to try and experiment with any number of culinary creations and to not be rude about ones that don’t appeal to them. Saying, “I don’t prefer these” is a skill to be developed, not avoided. Giving in to immature refusals and resorting to trickery seems to me to be a bad parenting technique. What are you going to do when they don’t want to do chores, take laundry to the pool, toss it into the water, and encourage kiddo to play “sink-the-bra”?

Mrs. Seinfeld’s ideas aren’t completely out of whack, of course. The idea of incorporating more healthy ingredients into any recipe is encouraged and smart. However, there are limits to how far you should go to combat what is, in most cases, a lack of parental effort in discipline and instruction, not a crisis of creativity. Of course, this goes for a lot of things, not just food creations.

I do, however, have to wonder about Jessica herself, because she seems a bit too involved in this entire, “puréeing”, thing. A quote for you, to demonstrate: “This is a secret that most people don’t know about me…I love puréeing and packaging,” she says. “I used to just have like one or two purées, but this has changed my purée paradigm.”

Purée paradigm?

Oh, sweetie, you have serious problems, and I’m not talking about mathematics.

Would I give beer to my child? Of course.

Wine? Why not?

Booze? Well….

I have long thought that America’s attitude towards alcoholic drinks is way out of whack with the rest of the world. CNN recently had an article about psychologist Stanton Peele’s book, Addition-Proof Your Child, which talks about how introducing alcohol to your children at a young age and dispelling its mysterious, “adult” qualities helps them to form a better, healthier attitude about it and makes it less likely that they will end up binge drinking or otherwise “partying it up” with their friends when they can legally do so.

The fact is, Europe and other areas of the world have a much more relaxed attitude towards the entire issue and you see a lot less abuse of it than you do here in the U.S. Kids end up having their first drinks with their parents at a decent age instead of 18 beers in a cornfield under the cover of night, trying to chug as much as possible while not getting caught.

My wife and I have talked about this many times and our children will have exposure to alcohol, under our close and purposeful supervision, starting at an appropriate age. This may be as young as 6 or 8 or perhaps around 10 or 11, it will depend a lot on the emotional and psychological maturity of the child in question. We will
teach
respect, but
not fearWe will teach respect, but not fear or mystery about it, as that leads them straight to it during their upcoming exploratory years, and that’s the last thing we want on their minds as something to be “rebellious” about.

Yolanda brings with her a lot of different viewpoints on alcohol due to her being Australian and the attitude being very different from America’s. Even I have experienced a much more relaxed attitude about it towards youth. Sure, there weren’t 12-year-olds stumbling down the street in a drunken stupor, but at the same time, nobody got bent out of place if a kid asked for a sip and a glass of wine during an event wasn’t uncommon. Alcohol simply wasn’t a skeleton in the closet, but a part of normal life.

Sadly, the societal attitude towards alcohol and children in this country is led and perpetuated by mis-informed groups who have completely missed the message that people like Peele and myself are trying to send to other parents. Their agendas break through and overpower any rational thought about alternative ideas being proposed to address problems like teen binging and alcohol abuse, because, as we all well know, it’s working so well.

A quote from the article has Calvina Fay, the executive director of the Drug Free America Foundation sounding like a complete twink:

“That’s ridiculous. By allowing teens to drink,” Fay says, “you are giving permission to your children to do harmful things.” Fay also says Stanton Peele doesn’t take into account other consequences of teen drinking, such as unsafe sex and drunken driving. “You don’t have to be addicted to be harmed or die because of drugs and alcohol.”

Despite her assertion that this is a call to have all parents haul their spawn out for a hazy night of bar-hopping and gawking at fishnets, the point of Peele’s book is to instill into children correct attitudes about alcohol use, not to give them permission to go off willy-nilly with a bottle in hand. It has Jack M. Squat to do with allowing teens to go off drinking on their own; instead, this is a plan to introduce your children to the ways and means of alcoholic drinks in a controlled, supervised, and managed environment before they are presented with the situation on their own and have to make the critical choice. I do not condone my children going off and drinking with their friends before they are 21 years old and they that do will quickly learn the feel of my foot in their ass. I do, however, want them to have the appropriate knowledge and tools to make the right choice at the right time.

I will provide my children with small, appropriate drinks, starting when they are younger in age, and including many, many discussions, learning opportunities, and instruction on the use and abuse of alcohol, its effects, pleasures, detriments, forms, appropriate and inappropriate uses alike. If we see a drunk at a party, it’ll be a learning opportunity for my kids. If I give them a drink, I’ll describe what it is, where it comes from, that it is alcoholic, is a drink usually enjoyed only by adults and why, and its possible effects. They will know that having a drink means having the maturity to handle it and its consequences, and they will learn that if they have that maturity, they may enjoy a drink infrequently with our supervision.

It’s all about attitude and knowledge, I think, and I plan to arm my offspring with the appropriate measures of both in this and many other areas of life. I can do no less as a parent.

How about you, my gentle reader? If you are a parent, or plan on it someday, what are your thoughts on this different way of looking at alcohol and your children?