When I was first introduced to grandparenting I had to adjust to rules my children set for their children's snacks at my house. One family did not want their toddler to eat certain sweets; the other forbade individual portions of boxed juice drinks. I was fine with their decisions; I just had to remember who approved of what lest I offer juice drinks to the wrong grandchild.
My experience was in keeping with what my friends were telling me: Their children were setting down food rules for grandchildren that were bewildering to grandparents. What's wrong with home-baked chocolate chip cookies?
I mention this because a recent letter to Carolyn Hax is a man-bites-dog variation on this theme. The complaint comes from a mother whose parents are serving her children super-healthy meals that the children won't eat. The grandparents refuse to supply snacks that would assuage the children's hunger, which occasionally causes meltdowns. The mother/reader continues:
"While the food may seem healthier at the grandparents’, I don’t like the amount of control the grandparents hold over the food for everyone else. Isn’t the point of a holiday to eat, drink and be merry? Do you have a food solution for when families of different generations and geographies come together that could help keep everyone sane?"
Here we are with tables turned. The grandparents aren't baking sugar-loaded cookies and letting their grandchildren snack on them all day; they are setting healthy eating standards that are over and beyond those of the parental household. So, is there a way to keep everyone sane about food? Here's part of what Hax has to say. Spoiler alert: Hax does not pour the blame on us:
If your kids are physically, medically or religiously able to eat what the grands serve and simply choose not to, then you have a straightforward path: Recognize that it’s not your place to parachute into the grandparents’ house with pallets of cheesy poofs. If their nutritional orthodoxy strains their bonds with the kids, then that’s a natural consequence the grands can perceive and address for themselves.
“Best-case,” though, and arguably the inevitable case, your kids will learn all kinds of things from the food gap: how different people and cultures express themselves in different homes, how to default to gratitude when someone goes to the trouble to provide them with healthy meals, how to cope when the world doesn’t bend to their will — all previously known as having some manners — and how to eat when they’re hungry.
Meltdowns are bad, but entitlement is so profoundly worse.
Painting: Pierre Bonnard, The Late Interiors
