Getting My Kids to Eat Healthy, or Who Needs Sanity Anyway?

One of the challenges to having a healthful life has been to get my kids to eat healthy.  My older daughter loves any form of cheese and starch:  mac and cheese, pizza, grilled cheese.  And chocolate—she’s seriously addicted.  My younger daughter craves anything with sugar in it.  Even the “healthy” foods that she eats have to be pretty sweet:  yogurt, cereal, soy milk.  Not surprisingly, she’s also had a lot of problems with cavities, about which I have enough motherly guilt sitting on my shoulders to almost crush me.  The only meat they really like is the unhealthy, salty, smoky kind.  On the positive side, they’re both good fruit eaters, they eat mostly whole grain carbs, and they’ll eat certain vegetables when we press them to.

Every weekday, I walk up to my youngest’s elementary school to walk her home from kindergarten.  Recently my daughter came home from kindergarten with Easter candy.  She asked me if it’s OK to eat it. I said “no” and she proceeded to suck on the jellybean in her hand.  Then she told me that at least the teddy grahams in her basket aren’t so bad.  Funny, I thought, I could have sworn they were cookies.  She asked again if she can have some of the treats once we’re at home, and I pretty much lost it.  I’m just so tired of dealing with the subject.  And why do other people think it’s their business to give my kids candy???  That’s my business.  And if they say to check with me before eating it, then I get to be the bad guy if I say “no”.   Fun, right?

I’m at the point of beginning to dedicate a lot more time to finding and cooking super-healthy foods they will actually eat.  I’ve tried some raw recipes, like berry soup with nut cream, and “cookies” made from dates and nuts ground together.  Not much luck with winning them over with those.  Sometimes I think it’s an impossible task, kinda like the two big tasks for a stay-at-home mom are cleaning your house and raising your kids and the two are diametrically opposed.  If you have kids living in your house, they are probably making it messy, right now this very second.  Likewise, children seem diametrically opposed to really truly healthy food, if they’ve had a taste of the bad stuff.  Trying to accomplish two opposing tasks at the same time is enough to drive any mom bonkers.