Getting the Kids to Love Veggies

Good Nutrition is a Mom-Job!

It’s true that one of the many ‘important’ jobs Moms do is to direct the proper nutrition of their families. Some Moms do better at this than others, as the growing obesity epidemic demonstrates. There are a surprising number of working Moms out there who don’t cook, and families that somehow manage to survive on pizza and hamburgers.

I was a singularly lousy cook back when I got married. Knew how to make exactly one thing - Campbell’s Bean with Bacon soup (add a pat of butter and a dollop of ketchup to the pot, eat it when it’s hot). I’ll never forget our first breakfast - I did so want to impress him! But I fried that bacon and fried that bacon until it shrunk to nothing and turned char-black, but it just never would get stiff! Brave and loving soul that he is, my hubby ate it anyway and even pretended to like it.

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Filed under Vegetables, Gourmet Cooking, Recipes, Feasts, Nutrition, Family Life | Comments (3)

10 Ways to Make Mom Buy

Moms spend much more money that Dads do. More than 2 trillion (with a ‘T’) dollars a year! That’s a darned lucrative market, so it’s one with a hefty amount of psychologizing put into it by Madison Avenue when they’re designing ad campaigns.

Now, there are people out there who will insist that the target audience for all this marketing is children, and many psychologists insist that advertising targeting children is unethical. Not that ethics counts for very much when there’s trillions of dollars on the table, of course. Deal is, children don’t work for a living, thus have little money to spend on all those expensive, questionably useful consumer items they’re being sold. The person who is REALLY being targeted is Mom. The marketers are just adding to the marketing appeal by enlisting children to do their work for them!

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Filed under Research, Marketing to Kids, Nutrition, Relational Stress, Family Life, Child-Parent Relationships | Comment (0)

Looking at Life from the Long End

The Older Child Adoption and Permanency Movement logo - Adopt Older Kids and Youth: A-OKAY.

It’s really kind of strange. When our own children were babies - and at 14 months apart, they were babies at the same time - we were positively terrified by them. Or maybe by our own perceived responsibilities FOR them. We spent many a long night just watching them sleep, deciding what we would and wouldn’t do in relation to the way our parents raised us, sowing the seeds for all new mistakes we invented along the way.

We didn’t have much furniture, being in the Navy and having to move every few months. So when hubby was at nuke school (that came between A-school and sub-school) in Bainbridge and we were living in falling-down WW-II housing blocks in Aberdeen, we put a mattress in the middle of the living room floor, pillows against the walls against which we could sit.

Daughter, our eldest, was just new to walking and didn’t mind having to crawl on soft living room floor one bit. Son wasn’t yet a year old, crawling and rolling was his main means of locomotion. I recall days and weeks spent doing nothing (apart from the usual cooking, dishes and laundry) but rolling around on that mattress with them laughing as hard as they could. Or just watching them wrestle with each other. They were so beautiful! So new, so promising. So much our responsibility!

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Filed under Relationships, Adoption, Marriage, Older Children, Family Life, Child-Parent Relationships | Comment (0)

Medical ‘Old Wives Tales’

…and the Doctors Who Believe Them

Newsweek Magazine published an article on its web page last week entitled Top Seven Health Myths, citing a study that demonstrated even doctors often fall prey to common medical misconceptions. And they do, too, sometimes for the basest of self-interested reasons.

I recall sitting at the breakfast table with my Mother-in-Law one morning back in the early 1980s, reading the daily newspaper. I came across an article about a formal position statement from the American Medical Association’s annual enclave, which stated as clearly and simply as possible that…

There Is No Evidence That Diet Is Related To Health.

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Filed under Research, Science, Medicine, History, Nutrition, Old Wives' Tales | Comments (2)