Call me a bad parent, I’ll still let my kids eat cake

I must be the worst parent in the world. I work full-time, and my two children are given sweeties or chocolate every day. They don’t often walk to school, and while the older one will occasionally gobble an apple (in addition to ‘treats’, never as a substitute), the little one thinks anything spelt with the ‘f-word’ is the work of the devil. My daughters, aged five and three, watch TV, play on the computer, and a trip to the supermarket is rarely complete without a ‘pester purchase’ of some description. And, and … But that’s probably quite enough to send me to the sin bin for the rest of my adult life.

According to two recent studies that have hit the headlines this week, children of working mothers are more likely to lead ‘unhealthy lifestyles’ than those whose mothers don’t work, while children who eat sweets every day are more likely to grow into violent adults than those who do not. The first study found that five-year-olds whose mothers worked part-time or full-time were more likely to have sweetened drinks between meals, to use computers or watch TV for at least two hours a day, and be driven to school, than children whose mums stayed at home. The second found that 69 per cent of people who had a violence conviction at the age of 34 had eaten confectionary every day as 10-year-olds, compared to 42 per cent of those with no violence conviction. The researchers offered several explanations for this apparent link, one of which was that giving in to children’s desire to eat things that they want might push them towards ‘more impulsive behaviour’.

Now, if I were a scientist I could no doubt find a million holes in these studies. These days it seems possible to ‘prove’ anything you like by crunching large numbers, while ignoring the inconvenient fact that correlation does not mean causation – just because violent people ate sweets as children does not demonstrate that the sweets made them violent. But I’m not a scientist, I’m a parent. And the specific ‘findings’ of these two studies are just the latest chapter in the ongoing saga of parent-blaming and guilt-tripping, which use over-stated claims about our children’s health to blame us for every problem under the sun.

Because, come on. Do we really believe that a bar of chocolate in front of the telly is going to turn our children into obese thugs? Parents know that raising a child is not like following a recipe, where you input the right ingredients and can (generally) expect a predictable result. Family life is made up of many things – meals, snacks and treats, some stimulating active fun combined with boring chores and down-time where the kids relax in front of the telly and parents regain some head-space. We don’t relate to our children by ‘doing parenting’ well or badly; we relate to each other as a family, doing what we need to do to get by. If working mothers spend less time on preparing dinner it’s because they are earning money to pay the bills, afford a holiday, or meet some other family priority. That seems far more significant for their children’s overall wellbeing than the consumption of ‘sweetened drinks’.

Yet policy-makers don’t see things like that. Increasingly, ‘parenting’ is presented as a narrow branch of scientific expertise, in which the good parent sticks rigidly to ridiculous, abstract assumptions about the precise ingredients needed to create the optimal child, and accepts being lectured to and patronised by officials in pursuit of that goal. So responding to the ‘working mothers = unhealthy kids’ study, a Department of Health spokesman pontificated piously about the importance of its Change4Life campaign, which uses cartoons and short words to scare the living daylights out of children and their parents about the allegedly dangerous consequences of eating too many chips.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that the obsession with children’s food habits itself is becoming entirely unhealthy, encouraging parents to worry themselves into a neurotic heap by the fact that their toddler spurns bananas and inciting children to interrogate the nutritional composition of very meal that their hassled mothers put on their plates of an evening. This undermines our authority as parents, and the enjoyment that we can all reap from family life. We need to stand up to these so-called experts: not only in questioning their pseudo-science, but in challenging the assumption that epidemiologists and policy-makers have the right to write the rule-book on what we feed our children. We’re not making soufflés here, but raising little people whom we love; and what we let them snack on should be nobody’s business but ours.

Jennie Bristow is author of Standing Up to Supernanny, Societas (Imprint Academic), September 2009. Price £8.95. Bristow will be speaking at the London Battle of Ideas festival on 31 October - 1 November on ‘Why we need a parents’ liberation movement’.

This article was first published in the Sunday Herald on 4 October 2009.