Kid Food Isn't a Category. It's a Failure

The kids' menu needs to disappear.

Walk into almost any restaurant and the children's options tend to be the same five things: fried chicken strips, pizza, mac and cheese, a hamburger, and buttered pasta. Even swapping the french fries for a side of broccoli does little to change the fundamental disservice we are doing to our children. Why have we accepted giving them an entirely different, lesser category of food rather than simply smaller portions of what we are eating?

I think about this constantly, as both a physician and a parent. Even at school, where we send our children to learn the fundamentals of life, the meals served are generally low-quality junk. My wife and I pack our five-year-old daughter a healthy lunch, and most days it comes home untouched, because her friends are eating the free school lunch. Naturally, she is drawn to the immediate gratification of "comfort food." Kids follow other kids, and if the standard around them is fried and processed, that becomes their standard.

This should never have required an epiphany for a physician who understands the value of nutrition, yet I too accepted this as the norm with my older children. I would often find myself finishing the chicken strips or mac and cheese my kids left behind, simply to avoid throwing it away. I would feel awful afterward, recognizing it would have been better off in the trash, yet somehow I would repeat the same mistake months later. We love our children more than we love ourselves, and yet we have quietly accepted feeding them in ways we would never choose to feed ourselves.

The message we send, without intending to, is that this is normal for now and that they will outgrow it eventually. The problem is that childhood and adolescence are precisely when peak bone density is established for life, when muscle and metabolic patterns are formed, and when the brain is developing more rapidly than it ever will again. This is the least appropriate time in a person's life to treat nutrition as an afterthought.

None of this means chicken strips and pizza need to disappear entirely. Enjoyed occasionally, as a true treat, there is nothing wrong with them. The problem is when they become the assumed default at restaurants and in schools, simply because a child is the one eating.

The solution is not complicated. Smaller portions of the same food we would choose for ourselves. Kids do not need a separate menu. They need a seat at ours.