Gimme Sugar

Last month, I took my fifteen-month-old son Leo to his friend Elliot’s first birthday party. It was a mostly adult gathering and as we sat around the table the mother of a seven-month old offered him a taste of ice cream from her spoon.

“I’m only giving him a taste,” she explained, cheeks flushed. “I almost never give him sugar.”

Across the table, the mother of the birthday boy was feeding him the slimmest sliver of carrot cake.

“It is his birthday,” she apologised. “This is practically his first sugar. We haven’t even given him meat yet.”

Standing in the kitchen doorway where I was letting Leo demolish an entire adult-sized piece of cake, I — as per usual when then conversation turns to baby diets — kept my mouth shut.

Because if I opened it, I’d have to admit that the first food Leo ever tasted was ice cream, straight from the plastic spoon at Molly Moon’s ice cream parlor after a trip to the zoo. Then I’d have to admit that on his first birthday he didn’t get some paper-thin slice but a full-sized piece of banana cake with plenty of frosting, and he downed every last crumb. That not only has he eaten meat of pretty much every persuasion, he’s also delved into pizza, fish sticks, and enough homemade cookies and cake to win me the Martha Stewart award.

As someone who’s tired of getting the evil eye from people who seem to think feeding your child a donut is the equivalent to feeding him crack. I’m just going to come clean and say it.

I wasn’t always the junk food cheerleader. My kid eats junk.

Part of it is practicality — or maybe just laziness. As a working single parent, I learned early on that I can’t keep every last ball in the air, not matter how ostensibly good it is for my child. Already, there have been plenty of nights when the home-cooked well-balanced meal of my intentions morphed into french toast.

But there’s a value system at play here too. I want eating — and life — to be fun for Leo, not something full of rules and shoulds. And let’s face it, junk food is fun. I don’t want to raise a child who’s a Puritan, who can’t kick loose and enjoy life’s pleasures. Maybe I’m waltzing him down the road towards obesity and heavy recreational drug use, but I’m willing to take that chance.

For me, this love affair with junk food is also personal. As a teenager I struggled with food. I had eating disorders and played pretty heavily into the shoulds and won’ts and endless rules. I feel lucky I have a boy, who won’t have to face the same kind of love/hate relationship with his size and shape. But if I came away from all that having learned anything, it’s that denial is a dangerous tool and that too little of anything can be as damaging as too much.

I wasn’t always the junk food cheerleader. While Leo was still breastfeeding, I had visions of being one of those mums who raised her kid the Super Baby Food way. I planned to reform both our eating habits to be full of whole grains and leafy greens and sugar only on birthdays and special occasions. It sounded like the right thing to do.

I got my first inkling this wasn’t going to work out when I took Leo to a party when he was about 3 months old. I watched a father try to steer his two kids away from the chocolate chip cookies and towards a plate of shrimp. Could I pull a lie like that over on my son? That shrimp is a viable choice over a chocolate chip cookie? Surely my kid is going to be smarter than that.

Then there was the friend who told me she never fed her three kids sugar, but that she and her husband pulled the ice cream tub from the freezer every night the second they went to bed. And another friend whose mother raised them on applesauce-sweetened date bars and told them they were cookies. And the mum I met at the park who proudly informed me that she’d baked her daughter a tofu-carob birthday cake for her second birthday and swore up and down this was celebrating. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that building a junk food-free life for Leo would involve a lot of lying — and that’s one dynamic I don’t want unfolding between us.

I can’t say I get any support in the popular press with this one. Every time I turn around there’s another parenting magazine or newspaper headline warning me my child’s going to be an obese and angry underachiever if I offer him any snacks besides apple slices and baby carrots.

Of course, those articles never mention the other side of things. But those of us who grew up around health nut families know the truth. There’s something wrong with kids who don’t ever get a taste of the darker side.

Children who are never exposed to junk flip out when they enter an environment that might potentially contain an M&M. I remember how, the second my mother left us alone in the kitchen, my friend Sarah would leap to the countertop like Cat Woman and begin scouring our cupboards for stale marshmallows and open bags of chocolate chips, anything that might smack of a sugar high. Kids like Sarah never learn the art of moderation. When they go off to university, instead of binge drinking, they’re likely to hole up at McDonalds and inhale five Big Macs at a time.

When it comes down to it, I don’t want to deprive my child of the experience of indulging in wanton pleasure. Sure, technically junk food is not good for him. But do we really have to do every last thing that’s good for our kids? Does that honestly make them better people or just uptight, inflexible, and holier than thou?

For now, I’m trying to model reasonably healthy behaviour on my end and pretty much letting Leo eat what he wants. If he starts angling for ice cream and lollies morning, noon and night, that may have to change. Until then, I cast my vote for raucous over restraint. When it comes down to it, I’d rather be raising a fun, inventive, original, sugar-hyped little boy than a kale-and-brown-rice-eating , mind-your-manners bore.