A Mandatory Carrot Will Not Give My Kids an Eating Disorder

How I learned from, disregarded, and ultimately made my peace with the nutrition police.

Content warning: frank discussion of diet culture, weight loss, and disordered eating.

There were a lot of reasons why I was so uptight the first few times I left my son with his grandmother. He was a 2020 baby and his social circle was, of necessity, stressfully small in his first year. I was a first-time mom (in a pandemic!). And I have a type-A personality that thrives on rules, order, and structure. So I wrote very long lists of everything that had to happen in order for my mom to watch my priceless angel child. My mom was understanding about it; she’s known about my anxious tendencies for as long as I’ve been sentient, and my worries can land safely with her.

At first, the lists I left included lengthy rules about warming up a bottle (warm water in a ceramic bowl! Never the microwave! Never cold out of the fridge!) and whether or not he could have Cheerios and puffs. As he got older and tried a few new foods, I started making little meals to store in containers in the fridge, still with instructions on what to give and when. Protein, starch, fruit, dairy, sometimes a little cookie or treat. With the meal, of course. Not as “dessert.” Dessert, I had learned, was not something that should be held over a child’s head as a reward. In order to cultivate a healthy relationship with food, sweets should be served along with the meal, even if that meant the child ate the cookie first and ignored the chicken cut up into individual molecules.

I had taken to the Internet as soon as my baby was old enough to eat solids, because I was determined to raise a Healthy Child. A child who loved vegetables because he was introduced to them early and often. A child who ate sensible portions of all the food groups, was not afraid to try new dishes, and who regarded sweets as a normal part of their life and not something to be craved, whined for, or in any way obsessed over.

Enter the Instagram nutrition experts.

Their videos were colorful, their advice concise, and their delivery confident. Here were all the macronutrients a 12-month-old needed to consume in one day, and here was how to serve them. Some of the advice was obvious: no choking hazards, limit added sugar and salt, don’t give kids caffeine. But some of it very quickly snaked down the rabbit hole into neurotic territory. (Who knew a single slice of bread was dangerously packed with sodium? I sure didn’t.)

Sugar, of course, was its own fraught topic. The crunchier moms advocated none whatsoever. Raw honey, raw maple syrup, monkfruit, agave nectar and probably organic extract of opossum breast milk were the only approved sweeteners if you wanted to raise a nature-communing, Waldorfian child who ran barefoot across grass that had never been sprayed with pesticides. Unfortunately, I was too keen on phonics and shoes (and, let’s be real, vaccines) to qualify for this. Bummer.

I really had no plans to completely ban sugar from my household. I, personally, am quite fond of sugar. My husband, who identifies as a “trash panda,” is as devoted to sugar as Cecily Cardew is to bread-and-butter and the name Ernest. The prospect of raising my child in a joyless ketogenic desert with an occasional pureed banana in a popsicle mold made me shudder. I fully intended to bake birthday cakes, take my kids out for ice cream, and puree my bananas into chocolate chip banana bread.

But I didn’t want them to be weird about sugar. Fanatics. Addicted. Binge-eaters.

Deep down, I didn’t want them to be fat. I had a history there.