“Is?”
“Is anything we have in the house,” he said. “It’s whatever you want.”
I stared at him, blinking with the disbelief that accompanies unbridled joy. Anything? We could have anything we wanted?
“Anything,” he clarified. “Whatever you can get your hands on, you can eat.”
Just the idea of permission like that terrifies and elates me. That father did something incredible for his daughters.
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9 Comments
I…don’t know how I feel about this. I shudder at the upbringing she must have had to think of food as something forbidden, something off-limits, something that couldn’t be eaten without the approval of the parental units. Somehow that seems to be to be the very antithesis of how we should feel about food. For me, it was thinking of it as something special and off-limits that made it so tempting and the first thing I went for when I needed something to pick me up, something to prove to myself that I was worth special treatment. It reminds me of college students who binge because they never had access to alcohol before.
When my kids want dessert, we check and see what’s available in the house, then they decide what it is they want and I help them get a reasonable sized portion. If they’re still hungry after that, then it’s time to break out the fruit-veg-healthy-only options.
I think at 5, 7, and 9, children DO usually have to get permission from their parents before they eat something. And this wasn’t about eating something in a “normal” way – it was about getting permission to eat a jar of icing for dessert if that was what they wanted. I get the feeling they were fed healthy meals with limits set on how much junk food they got – the way responsible parents ought to set limits on kids.
You help your kids get a reasonable size portion and then break out the health food if they are still hungry. That is AWESOME but that is a totally different experience than this special moment of abandoning the idea of reasonable sized portions – these kids were given direct experience of what it is like to devour the world. And they, or at least this one person, learned that it isn’t a terrible thing, it just makes them a little sick. And so s/he doesn’t have to do it. Isn’t even tempted.
I agree that having young children ask permission before they eat something is fine and good, as long as the language and attitude around what is allowed and what isn’t has more to do with when mealtimes are and making sure there is enough to go around and less to do with what is a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ food.
I love this story.
I guess that’s true. I looked at it more as a limitation and release of what food to eat rather than how much. Maybe Halloween would be a good time to try the eat until you don’t want more idea?
Car, I had similar thoughts just reading the excerpt here, but when I read the whole entry, I really liked it.
I think that if I ever have kids, trying to teach them about good nutrition without giving them major food hang-ups might just be the hardest thing for me to negotiate. Seriously, it scares me more than any number of potential parenting hardships.
My mom didn’t even BUY anything sugary or processed, so I had to wait until my frosh year @ college to work out that just because I can, and I wanna, doesn’t mean I really want to eat something. Or everything.
“And looking back, it was brilliant of him to have given that to us at a point in our lives where whatever we wanted was available in the baked goods aisle at ShopRite, with a possible detour into candy/frozen foods. And that while we might get older and begin wanting larger, more complicated things, at least once we had gotten everything we wanted.”
There’s the rub.^
What do I want to binge on now? A space/time travel machine so I can head back to a month or so ago when I missed the les savy fav show in NYC b/c I was too broke to travel there for it.
Preaching to the choir, I know, but your run of the mill bingeing that’s not related to deep seated eating disorders (just your run of the mill almost-everybody’s-got-one eating disorders, I guess) is a function of not having possibilities. When everything is available to you, why binge on anything, right?
As for the littles, this is only by observation of my sister’s three kids, so take it with a grain (or shakerfull) of salt, but it seems that kids have and pay attention to their hunger cues. They know what they want/need and when they want/need it. They don’t tend to eat beyond fullness or diet unless they are mimicking those behaviors in someone else.
Yeah, posts about good fathers make me emotional too. I think cause it makes me think about how fortunate I am to have such a great father.
With very few exceptions, my kids can pretty much have whatever we have in the house whenever they want it and they don’t go nuts and binge like that. I used to be more controlling over their diet. Back then, if my daughter found chocolate she’d eat it until she threw-up (she was really young at the time). Letting loose the control allowing her to have it when she wanted it made her quit doing that to herself.
That story kind of creeped me out.
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[...] 24, 2007 The Rotund commented on this LJ entry about a father, one night, letting this three young daughters choose to eat [...]