Happy Meals - Just Say No

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Question of the day: Who is responsible for the obesity epidemic among children?

My answer: Parents

The food police would like to blame McDonald's and other fast food establishments, as evidenced by recent legislation in San Fransisco that bans fast food restaurants from giving away free toys with their meals.  But let's get real.  It is the PARENTS that purchase said meals.  It is the PARENTS who use televisions and computers as babysitters for their kids and let their kids be seduced by McDonald's commercials all day long.  It is the PARENTS that give in when their kids stomp their feet and demand Happy Meals.  No parent has a gun to her head forcing her to feed her kid fattening, low-nutrition, fast food.

Yet in our culture of overly-permissive parenting, where kids rule the roost and dictate what they will eat and how little they will exercise, the blame gets shifted to everyone except the people who are ultimately responsible - the parents.

Yes, McDonald's gives away toys with its kiddie meals.  They've been doing that since I was a kid, yet there was no obesity epidemic when I was young.  Why?  Because kids of my generation were - at our parents' insistence - outside playing.  We were riding bikes, running around, playing kickball, climbing trees, creating obstacle courses and burning lots of calories in the process.  Food was fuel for our growing bodies.  We weren't locked in our rooms, sitting on our butts with our faces in front of a screen.   We ate dinner seated at the kitchen table every night, and there were vegetables served with every meal.  We weren't shoveling down mass-produced slop in the back of a mini-van.  Meals at McDonald's were a once-in-a-while treat, not a 3 times/week savior for parents who are too busy or preoccupied to cook a well-balanced meal.  And it would not even occur to us to insist on ANYTHING.  Our parents made the rules, not us, and if they said "no Happy Meal", that was the end of it.

It's different today.  Apparently, parents have no control over what - or how much - their kids eat, and they are unwilling to say NO.  They don't know how to control or discipline their kids, so they cajole and bribe them with junk food - a reward for using the potty, a reward for not having a meltdown, a reward for a good grade, a reward for breathing.  Consequently, children develop an unhealty, emotional, addictive relationship with food, instead of a healthy one where food is treated as sustenance.

McDonald's - and other corporate entitites that profit from sales to children -are of course manipulative, crafty, and creative and they probably have a team of highly-paid consultants advising them on the most effective way to brainwash little minds into intense desire for their "food". They're in business to make a profit, after all - that's their job.  But no matter how much the government tries to spread the blame around and legislate healthy eating, the buck stops with the parent.  Parenting is their job.  And if the parent can't erect enough of a spine to say no when his kid screams for a Happy Meal, then he has no business being a parent in the first place.

White Linens and Apes

Because there is simply no end to restaurant sagas, I share with you another installment.

Hubby and me were recently away on a mini-vacation and ended it with a lovely breakfast at a fancy hotel. The hotel was on a sprawling country estate and the dining room was a fancy-shmancy affair with white linen draped tablecloths, fine china and panoramic views of the countryside. (This is an actual photo of the dining room). The place just oozed old school sophistication - not a place any reasonable person would think to bring small children. However, because a major amusement park is located nearby, many hairbrained parents felt it was perfectly acceptable to take their children here for breakfast, instead of to the far more suitable local Denny's.

Upon arriving, the hostess escorted us to a table smack-dab between 2 young families, one of which had a toddler who was in the process of having a full-blown hissy fit; the other table with 3 young children who were climbing on the chairs like out-of-control apes. Realizing that this was going to make for a very unpleasant experience, I asked the hostess if she could please seat us away from the tables with small children. Well, you should have seen the look she gave me. It was a look of total incomprehension, as though I had asked her to board us onto a rocket ship in the center of the dining room and launch us into outer space. It took her about 10 seconds of looking at me blankly before she was able to comprehend my request, at which time she launched into a full-blown explanation of their seating procedures and how, in order to be fair to all the waitresses, they must seat their customers in certain sections, in the order in which the customers arrive.

I told her that is all well and good, but repeated our preference of not being seated near families with small children. I pointed to an empty table across the room that was a good distance away from the kinder-calamities and asked her if we could be seated there. After some more hemming and hawing, a consultation with the dining room manager, and making it obvious to us that we were really putting her out, she finally agreed to seat us there.

Of course it was only a matter of time before more families came into the dining room, filling the formerly-quiet tables around us. At one point during our meal, I looked around the dining room at the goings-on. One family had a child who was talking and singing at the TOP OF HER LUNGS. Not once did either parent instruct her to quiet down. She just kept on talking and singing to the annoyance of everyone except her parents.

At another nearby table with slightly older children, we watched as 2 of the children ran around their table playing tag while the oblivious parents ate their breakfast, never once even looking up from their plates to so much as visually acknowledge their ill behavior. Their third child, a boy who looked to be about 10 years old, had apparently gotten bored at the table, so he proceeded to perch himself upon one of the dining room's windowsills and played with his shoelaces, again, all within the sight of the parents and dining room staff and all without a single disciplinary comment from any of them.

Hubby and me just shook our heads and like two old farts, reminisced about our own upbringings and how in our day we would have never DREAMED of exhibiting such behavior because our parents would have immediately put a stop to it. We were well aware that there were certain behaviors that went along with dining out in restaurants and singing, playing tag and climbing on chairs and windowsills like monkeys was not among them.

This stuff may seem minor, but it truly makes us fear for our future. What is our world going to be like when the coddled products of these lazy, inconsiderate, oblivious and overly-permissive parents are running the world? The thought of this truly sends shivers of fear down our spines.