So this week I have to confess, while I try to focus and offer my kids healthy choices, my family is not perfect and we sometimes stray away from making the best choices. However, I felt the need to share a story of something that happened with my son.
Having 4 boys, I am usually at some sort of baseball field, basketball court or hockey rink, where or course they always sell “the bad stuff”. I am continuously trying to get my kids to NOT buy food or drinks out of the vending machines. First of all, its more expensive and second, the options are usually not healthy ones.
My son Danny always asks for a Gatorade at most events and I continue to encourage him to stay away from them. Sports Drinks are one of those items that have alot of added sugar and foods dyes in them, which negatively impact the kids behaviours. Of course they don’t care if they are bouncing off the walls, they just like the taste. At home I encourage the kids to drink alot more water and stay away from all of the sugary substitutes. We try to pack a water bottle or an all natural sports hydration drink. But this particular day I didn’t plan ahead and I decided to give in and allow him to pick a drink from the vending machine. He knows my preference of choices, so he decided that rather than choosing a Cola “Caffeinated Product” or Gatorade “A Food Dye Product”, that he would make a better choice, a lighter colored soda product like 7Up. There is no caffeine, but still sugar. I relunctantly agreed.
I started the drive home and my son said ” Mommy is 78 grams of sugar bad?”. I almost slammed on my breaks and said what?! What I didn’t realize was that my son bought a “Mellow Yellow”. My response was “Honey, you know how mommy doesn’t let you drink Mountain Dew? This is the “Coke” version of it. If I would have known I wouldn’t have let you buy it. It has way too much sugar and caffeine in it.” In that moment, I had to make a decision, do I let him drink this overly caffeinated sugary drink, or do I say NO you can’t have it.
My son’s response was “Oh, how about I only drink half of it and then give the rest to you.” I reluctantly agreed. To be honest I was completely surprised by his next action. Now, this is the child who will do something just to annoy you and push the limits, but in this instance, he surprised me. My son drank only about 1/3 of the bottle and gave the rest to me without complaint. He didn’t ask about it again.
While in this case, my son made a bad choice on the product he bought, however he made a good choice by learning to look at the label, educated himself and made the decision on how he would handle this new knowledge. While I would have preferred he not drink any at all, if I would have told him no, I think I would have seen an entirely different scenario play out.
Let’s face it, our kids won’t always make the best choices even if they do know what the right answer is. I can’t force them to eat all good healthy foods and I won’t always be there when they begin to make choices on their own. What I can do is put my best foot forward and hope that my leading by example will help teach them to make better choices as they get older. In this case, what started out as a “bad choice” became a good life lesson.