On Sun, 13 Feb 2005 21:19:23 EST, (dan)
wrote:

Welcome to misc.kids.moderated. I'm going to respond with a bit of
challenge; I hope you won't take it amiss.

"Doing" for my children sometimes seems easier in the moment; yet
showing them how to "do' for themselves, so that they learn, will
often bring better results in the longer term.

[...]

Feeding a child a healthy diet may not be the easy path, but allowing
too much sugar and fat is the harmful course in the later time.

Actually, the juxtaposition of these two general statements makes me
notice that it's not nearly that simple. The real trick is to
provide a variety of healthy food and a good example, and an amount of
guidance about what and when and how much to eat that is appropriate
for the child and his/her age, and to let your child learn to make
some of those decisions. The details of course depend on the age and
the child's personality and food preferences, but other posters on
this newsgroup can give you lots of examples, such as letting young
children help themselves to carrots and apples at any time, modeling
and enforcing appropriate ways to not finish one's plateful of dinner,
and not giving sweets the lure of the forbidden.

I sometimes work at a camp for gifted 17-18yo, and I am always shocked
at how many of them complain about the cafeteria food, struggle with
making varied healthy choices in the cafeteria, or order take-out food
most nights. When I then point out that they have the choice of
*not* living in residence when they attend university, they stare at
me. I can't tell whether it's because everyone in their life takes
residence for granted, or whether they can't quite get their heads
around fending for themselves, but I quite enjoy planting more seeds
of autonomy and choice.

Louise