Last month, I took my fifteen-month-old son Leo to his friend Elliot?s first birthday party. It was a mostly adult gathering and as we sat around the table the mother of a seven-month old offered him a taste of ice cream from her spoon.
"I?m only giving him a taste," she explained, cheeks flushed. "I almost never give him sugar."
Across the table, the mom of the birthday boy was feeding him the slimmest sliver of carrot cake.
"It is his birthday," she apologized. "This is practically his first sugar. We haven?t even given him meat yet."
Standing in the kitchen doorway where I was letting Leo demolish an entire adult-sized piece of cake, I ? as per usual when then conversation turns to baby diets ? kept my mouth shut.
Because if I opened it, I?d have to admit that the first food Leo ever tasted was ice cream, straight from the plastic spoon at Molly Moon?s ice cream parlor after a trip to the zoo. Then I?d have to admit that on his first birthday he didn?t get some paper-thin slice but a full-sized piece of banana cake with plenty of frosting, and he downed every last crumb. That not only has he eaten meat of pretty much every persuasion, he?s also delved into pizza, fish sticks, and enough homemade cookies and cake to win me the June Cleaver award.
As someone who?s tired of getting the fish-eye from people who seem to think feeding your child a donut is the equivalent to feeding him crack. I?m just going to come clean and say it.
I got my first inkling this wasn?t going to work out when I took Leo to a party when he was about 3 months old.? I watched a father try to steer his two kids away from the chocolate chip cookies and towards a plate of shrimp. Could I pull a lie like that over on my son? That shrimp is a viable choice over a chocolate chip cookie? Surely my kid is going to be smarter than that.
Then there was the friend who told me she never fed her three kids sugar, but that she and her husband pulled the ice cream tub from the freezer every night the second they went to bed. And another friend whose mother raised them on applesauce-sweetened date bars and told them they were cookies. And the mom I met at the park who proudly informed me that she?d baked her daughter a tofu-carob birthday cake for her second birthday and swore up and down this was celebrating. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that building a junk food-free life for Leo would involve a lot of lying? ? and that?s one dynamic I don?t want unfolding between us.
I can?t say I get any support in the popular press with this one. Every time I turn around there?s another parenting magazine or newspaper headline warning me my child?s going to be an obese and angry underachiever if I offer him any snacks besides apple slices and baby carrots.