Animal Crackers and Liver

I was pondering yesterday if what you ate as a child proved anything about yourself as an adult - and I concluded that, it was probably a bigger indicator of your parenting - at least up to a certain age.  All kids are naturally picky eaters - but there's a difference between the futility of expecting kids to eat liver and the obstinate choosy chomper who turns their little noses up at restaurant mac and cheese.  In this spectrum lies the type of parent that one is: its unrealistic to expect kids (or really anyone) to eat liver but you can't allow a kid to skip to dessert if a well-meaning dinner was passed on - and these simple child rearing daily battles determine, to a degree, what kind of an adult you will become. Maybe not with food, but certainly with how you handle things that you don't want to do: will you turn your nose up at something that requires work and discipline and skip to dessert or power through the nutrition to reap the rewards down the road?

Life problems, in a sense, can boil down to biting a bit a time the difficulties - digesting the things that require work to get to the benefits later on. Man can survive on cookies and cake but not flourish. Protein, complex carbohydrates, fresh fruit and vegetables take time to cook and prepare but give the body the fuel needed to prosper. All of these same theories apply to life and life's inherent contentions.

Which brings me back to what you ate as a child. My mom likes to tell the story of how she fooled me for years by convincing me that "cookies" were crackers and "fries" were carrot sticks. And today, as an adult, I have a strong affinity for carrots and other "rabbit foods" that are nutritionally sound and often forced down by society. I am not sure if that has anything to do with my mom's foolery - but it definitely didn't hurt.

It wasn't that I was not allowed to have "bad" foods - because that makes kids desire them more, especially later on in life when they have more control over their daily choices - It's just that she didn't stock them in the house.  At home, we didn't keep convenience foods or Capri Suns or candy or Dorito's on a day-to-day basis but, if I was at a friend's house or we were at a party or event, these things were little treats I was allowed to have - with no parenting guilt. Its not about sacrifice, its about control. Self control, my mom letting go of control in certain situations, my gaining my own control, or feeling like I had the upper hand control - if even for a moment as I chowed down on Oreo's - these are all things that teach kids how to be successful adults. How to have control when they need it and, similarly, give it up when that is what the situation calls for as well - to treat control like a pendulum with self or familial intrest always in the forefront.

Think about how you approach problems and what you expect from others and yourself and the time on Earth and decide if you're treating "life" like liver and onions, fighting it every step of the way and skipping the work for the Nabisco, OR rolling with the nutrition and working toward the gourmet desserts.