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Comment by dstorrs | Hacker News Reader

I've often wondered about this...I know several parents of small children, and all of them have trouble getting their kids to eat. After a while, the parents get tired of the fight and they let the kid eat what they want--often pasta or such--instead of what the parent wants to serve them.

When I was a kid, this just wasn't an issue. Food went on my plate, and I ate it. Sure, I would whine a bit about eating broccoli or whatever, but I never won any of those debates. So, I wonder:

1) Am I having selective memory?

2) Did I have an unusually tough set of parents / was I an unusually compliant child?

3) Has the level of marketing that kids are exposed to gone up so much in the last few decades?

4) Something else?

What do the rest of you think? Do you remember setting the rules with your parents about what you would eat?

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My money is on #3, plus #4 - There are tremendously more varieties of prepackaged imitation food crap available today than there were a few decades ago, because growth and profits in the food industry are in processed food. So kids today have a huge smorgasbord of junk food being created for them and marketed directly to them. Parents almost don't stand a chance.

Yeah but there was a still sizable smorgasbord of junk food being created and marketed to us as kids too. We were well aware of different chocolates/biscuits/soft drink/fast food and while some kids still got this kind of stuff (much to the envy of most of the class) most kids were forced to eat basic prepared foods. In contrast, these days I meet kids who can't recall ever drinking water (always a soft drink or milk). Is it perhaps that the parents of the current generation were the first to grow up as children with fast food they couldn't have and so enable their kids (perhaps without conscious thought) to have what they couldnt?

I was a foodie from the moment I was born, so I never had to set down any rules. I just ate everything. It helped that both my parents were (still are) quite excellent cooks.

Perhaps it is the level of marketing today though. All of my little cousins and nieces/nephews (big family) are really picky eaters, some on a level that makes me wonder about the parents.

I know all of those kids watch excessive amounts of television, and I never watched television. My family didn't own a TV until I was 16.

Perhaps it is the TV marketing of certain foods? I have no idea.

It may also have been the types of food I was raised on. My parents were on a big health kick right after I was born, so most of my first solid food memories consist of tons of vegetables, fish, meat and occasional bread. We had dessert maybe once a week, and breakfast was never cereal. The closest thing I ever had to cereal was along the lines of oatmeal.

My parents had a simple rule they instituted after our food fights: You can eat what is on the table or go hungry - obviously if there was only 4 of some kind, I would only get to eat one.

That means that if I didn't care about a particular kind of food I didn't have too eat it, but on the other hand I wouldn't eat junk because it wasn't served.

The problem with eating everything that is on your plate is that it steams from a time when you could actually risk not being able to afford food tomorrow - today it just causes overeating.

I know several parents of small children, and all of them have trouble getting their kids to eat.

Likewise. My hypothesis is that the kids didn't like to eat food that was hard to chew. Hot dogs: yes, steak: no. Beets: yes, carrot sticks: no.

The standard joke was that children would eat any food that had been "nuggetized". All we need now is a home nuggetizer to test that hypothesis.

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