PreTeena by Allison Barrows for August 12, 2022

Good sound advice if you ask me mom.

Written by kids, for kids.

That’s good advice. Years later, I learned that Dad didn’t like the foods we kids didn’t like either, but he kept his trap shut in order not to irritate mom.

When my first daughter was a born, I somehow got a subscription to a Parenting Magazine. It should have been subtitled, “For parents with huge houses, and too much time & money on their hands.”

Of the meals my mother cooked, I only learned to cook the ones I like.

Growing up, I got the impression that adults ate everything and it was always the kids that were bad, spoiled, ungrateful, etc. I learned later that there is very little that I don’t like to eat, and probably would have been OK with as a child. It turned out that the things I disliked or made me sick as a kid were the result of texture, not taste (e.g., burned crust, slimey filling, undercooked bits). I also learned that there were lots of things that I never had as a kid that I really enjoyed after discovering them later in life (roast lamb in particular comes to mind). It turns out that the reason my parents ate “everything” was because they never served what they didn’t like! I’m still a bit annoyed at the “deception”.

The rule in our house was that if Mom liked it, so did we, even if we thought we didn’t.

Some nasty doctor told my mother that I was malnourished and she needed to feed me liver and Pablum (a form of cooked cereal). Neither of those abominations ever crossed my lips despite sitting in front of them for hours every day. If you want a kid to eat, give them something that tastes good.