fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #5408 ]

[ SECRET POST #5408 ]

⌈ Secret Post #5408 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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[Horrible Histories]

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[Buffy the Vampire Slayer]

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[Incarnations of Immortality]

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 25 secrets from Secret Submission Post #774.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

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Why are you so insistent on making your kids eat foods they don't like? I can understand asking them to taste stuff before saying yuck, and not just shovelling candy and desserts down their throats, but if you know that your kids hate beans or cauliflowers, why keep making them dishes that contain those things? Just substitute a different foodstuff for them to eat with a similar nutritional profile, or plan a different meal entirely. Is the whole eat your #foo such an important hill to die on?

I'm not sure if I'm ever going to be able to find this podcast anymore (it was devoted to brassica plants, the origin of so many vegetables we eat), where one of the episodes was over the topic of parenting, and the psychology of how people came to enjoy bitter vegetables as a child. The researchers interviewed a child and asked him what he thought about brussel sprouts. The little kid said that it reminded him of his mommy and daddy.

Me personally, if you want to instill good dietary habits of wanting to eat vegetables, just make sure it's well buttered and salted first. I have a cousin who hates every single vegetable in the world and won't eat any, and I'm not sure how they're alive.

Oh god this was my mother all the way right into my teen years. What was worse was when I was showing signs of getting sick and told her that I thought I was allergic to pork (turned out to be celiacs which made more sense since a lot of pork products uses gluten in their products) - her solution was to keep making me eat pork stuff with the belief that I would 'get over it'. Thankfully I was able to get a diagnosis from the doctors and was able to move out when she started tampering with my food to prove I was lying.

I'm glad you were able to get away from that fucked up situation.

My parents were not this. When we first moved to the Philippines, though, we stayed with a family, and that family's mother was like this. And she thought that because it was her house, she was more in charge of me and my sister than my parents. She once made me eat a whole plate of scrambled eggs that I didn't ask for. I already didn't partly love them, but from then on I hated them.

Man, this. I asked the Monstrous Bebe to try stuff, and I and her dad ate a lot of different things, so she got to try lots of stuff. But when she said something was gross and she didn't like it, well - that was that.

I recall being forced to eat lima beans as a kid and good gods, they suck, and I hate it, so - didn't want to go there for sure.

My parents split up before I was born and had 50/50 joint residency. My mother was the "You'll eat what I make" type. I'm pretty sure she only ever took my preferences into consideration at all because it saved her the effort of having to bully me into eating. By contrast, my father never made me eat anything I really didn't want to eat. I do think my father was maybe a little too indulgent, but for the most part I feel his way was far superior parenting in just about every respect.

In my opinion, the "You'll eat whatever I make" approach is a hallmark of a very particular style of parenting. The type that views children as second class citizens: you owe them nothing, and they owe you obedience. 'Life isn't fair; because I said so; if you don't smack them how will they learn obedience,' and all that bullshit. It's a whole mentality that I don't really understand, but it seems to be one of those things that is more common with some demographics than it is with others (I think it's more common among working class backgrounds, for example, and speaking very much from personal experience) and it gets passed down through generations, i.e. they cannot conceive of parenting in any way but the way they experienced it as a child themselves, so that becomes the right way, and any other style is wrong.

Vic? Is that you?

NAYRT

But huh??

I have no idea who you’re referring to, because there’s a lot of Vics in this world. And AYRT is absolutely right, so hopefully you’re not trying to reference someone as a dig at them.

OP - No, I'm not Vic, sorry. Guess I just have one of those writing styles.

My parents definitely had the parenting style of 'you have to try atleast one mouthful bite' and that every different way to prepare the vegetable counted as needing to try again to see if I would like it better now. Granted this did lead me to finding out what ways I really liked my foods prepared and cooked growing up (parents were also big on being culinary adventurous and trying to cook different types of cuisines to encourage my own exploration)

If it was something truly disliked it was a very occasional side dish (more for my parents then for me). And they were usually OK to cover it in cheese or eat it with a condiment like ranch or ketchup if it helped me eat a bit. Though it was also ok to load up on the second vegetable side dish if the first offered wasn't liked.

power trip, that's literally it

I CAN M A K E YOU EAT IT, I CAN M A K E YOU DO WHATEVER I WANT.

this was my egg donor. both of us kids had texture issues but honestly, we ate most vegetables with no issues. broccoli, beans, tomatoes, corn, salad greens, spinach, carrots, peas, asparagus, potatoes/yams, cabbage, even turnips/rutabaga. lima beans and eggplant were just...gross, but she would force us to eat them until we puked. then she'd yell at us and we'd get smacked. of course the simple, non-traumatizing solution would have been to use any of the literal dozen other vegetables i named there that we would eat with no problems, but nope, gotta be lima beans or eggplant. bEcAuSE I sAiD sO.

straight up power trip. she wonders why im no contact with her bitch ass, too.

Idk, I have no kids and my dad especially was much more concerned about my not being allowed processed anything including white sugar, white flour, artificial flavors and colors, etc, than in making me eat specific vegetables, so long as I ate some green ones. But then, I would've starved if I didn't eat beans because beans and tofu were 90% of the protein we ate/could afford, and I liked broccoli and cauliflower so long as they weren't cooked to mush.

My dad force fed me massive doses of nutritional supplements, though, even if I threw up or cried afterward. He believed in healthy eating like evangelical Christians believe in Jesus, and he was abusive in enforcing food rules in the same way any zealot enforces rules their kids don't share.

But otherwise normal parents? Probably some control issues, not enough time/money/energy/knowledge to make meals their whole family will eat, or they were raised to eat whatever was put in front of them and never questioned it when it came to their own kids.

If my mom didn't eat everything on her plate, she wasn't allowed to leave the table until she did, and if she tried, the same food would be put in front of her at every meal, until she learned to choke it down before it grew mold and she had to eat it or get beaten.

Oh, this is a fun question. My parents were mostly not like this, with some exceptions that all occurred when I was very young but most likely fell into the "We bought a ton of this because it was on sale and we're poor so this is what we're eating" category. There was probably a better way to handle it, but they were also young and dumb at the time.

My grandmother was totally like this. Some of it was the ground-in, Depression-era "If it's on your plate, eat it and be grateful" attitude that she was raised with. Some of it was leftover '50s and '60s era parenting bullshit. "Children must eat [various things that children don't want to eat] for their health" was an actual thing that doctors and parenting books enforced for a while. But a lot of it was just... her needing to win a battle of wills with a 7-year-old, for whatever reason.

autocratic parenting and/or poverty and/or lack of other cooking expertise is usually the categories it falls into, that I've seen. I'm not sure you can assume that people can make a more palatable substitution, or even know what an adequate substitution would be.

my mother was not like this mostly (I had texture issues and the will to refuse as a baby so the battle was won before it began), tho she did make me eat a couple bites of lima beans when she cooked them, and I continued to be confused as to why she kept making them if she wasn't going to eat them all herself.

my parents not only did this but thought it was really funny.

If the parents aren't actually forcing the kids to eat it if they don't want to, there's nothing wrong with serving foods they don't like every once in a while. Kids are frequently picky about veggies at first and then all of a sudden they'll decide they like something they didn't before - my friend's daughter turned up her nose at peas for months and now she loves them. Mom would just offer her peas every so often and one day she decided she wanted to eat them. That's pretty common. If you keep giving kids the opportunity to taste something for themselves again, unless they have actual texture issues they'll often come around on their own.

Leafy greens are essential for healthy gut bacteria to thrive. In a family where there is an increasingly obvious link between our familial health issues and gut bacteria problems, you're damn right we feed our kid vegetables she wouldn't otherwise choose to eat. We've explained why, and we all make a game out of it and it's fine.

We take other measures too, but that's not what you're asking about.

Wait, you knew there were family gut problems that were inheritable and you still chose to have kids? That is damn irresponsible of you, please tell me that you are not going to be pushing for grandkids to sentence yet another generation to misery. If you've got inheritable health problems, it is cruel to be having kids.

DA

People usually find out about this over a period of time. Not necessarily before or immediately after a child is born.

And how do you know about whether or not these conditions are very life threatening, anyhow?

nayrt

There's a difference between being aware of a family issue where one part of your life might be higher maintenance, and rolling the dice with a curse that will severely limit a kid's quality of life. If we all chose not to have kids because we fear they might have to be a little more responsible with their health... there wouldn't be a lot of humans on the planet right now (which, yes, I realize might not be a bad thing).

Ayrt doesn't mention the severity of the problems. We have no idea if it's chronic constipation or something that literally tears up the colon.

Also, notice they said kid. Singular. Not kids. If they knew there was a 90% chance of their kid inheriting, say, a rare bone cancer that might kill them in their teens, and they continued to have kids, THAT would be irresponsible.

Besides, eating healthful foods is just a good idea. If all you eat is McDonald's, and never even look at a vegetable unless it's deep fried, is it really a surprise if you get the runs all the time?

Yeah, there should be a lot less people on the planet. Birth control based on lactose intolerance alone would pretty much solve our population issue. And a lot of economic and human rights abuse issues too.

Re: Parents, question.

(Anonymous) - 2021-10-27 18:16 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Parents, question.

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(Anonymous) - 2021-10-27 19:20 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Parents, question.

(Anonymous) - 2021-10-27 18:36 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Parents, question.

(Anonymous) - 2021-10-27 20:55 (UTC) - Expand

Yeah, I probably should have invested in genetic testing and aborted my child because of the family history of IBS, but y'know it just didn't occur to me at the time for some reason.
Jackass.

No need for abortion. You could have used brith control or vasectomy/ligation. But, yeah, you really ought to have sprung for a health check of yourself and your partner to make sure there were no major health factors you could pass onto an innocent kid, like IBS.

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