Without digging into the details of this particular issue, I'll say that working through food choices with kids is an exhausting process.
I have two girls - ages 5, 22 months. They both love pouches. I don't love that they love pouches. But, if it comes down to eating/consuming anything vs. not, I'm often siding with consumption vs. nothing.
Of course, I can make food for them with high-quality ingredients, and do, but it is nearly impossible to force a kid to eat something you want them to eat vs. whatever it is they have in mind (like a pouch).
I do what I can to keep as much crap out of my house but some inevitably seeps in. And, tough to control the situation once they are mostly not at home (school, daycare, w/nanny/friends/etc.)
Not to be a jerk, but just don’t ever introduce the concept of pouches.
We bought a few when we started to transition to solids but never used them. Our one year old eats the protein we are eating (and has since about six months) and then has her own vegetables, cheese, chickpea pasta, etc.
Pouches aren’t a reality for her and thus she won’t ask for one. Same with gold fish, fruit juice and a ton of other metabolic disasters. Granted this is easy right now and, to your point, is going to get harder when she enters the school system. I’ll need a strategy for that next.
There is no strategy. You're up against the best devils Madison Avenue has to offer and peer pressure. Even if you win on this front you're going to lose on others. That's the fact of raising a kid in the 21st century in an advertising-saturated culture.
> Not to be a jerk, but just don’t ever introduce the concept of pouches.
TBH this does sound like a real jerk comment (especially given the lack of any ability to travel backwards in time), but it is nonetheless correct. IME, the less they have of that stuff the less the less they'll want it.
Still, different kids are different. When dealing with a kid who's lost their mind due to hunger (and for those who doubt, that's a real thing, not an exaggeration), having to choose between offering healthy food or no food can be a no-win situation.
I wish you the best of luck - not cynically. Especially when your kid can buy their own lunch at school (even if you packed one).
In my school district, they will NOT stop a kid from eating what they want to eat. Personally, I don't argue with that. They need to consume something so better it be something that they'll actually eat than nothing (which happens, trust me)
I only have one kid but our experience matched yours: we didn't change our own eating habits once we had a kid (well, fewer restaurants) and kid got what we got (not solid food when baby of course, and milder curries) so there wasn't really much to argue about. We didn't care what he ate when visiting friends, or at school, and didn't make a big deal about it. Two parents from two countries, both immigrants: our food was just what it was. Now he's grown up and eats better than I do.
And that was my own experience too: 60 years ago we brought "weird" lunches compared to the other kids at school. We all traded a bit of course and I don't remember it being a big deal, though my sister complained so maybe I was just an oblivious nerd.
That's a great plan, until you're exhausted at the grocery store and your kid sees another kid eating one and starts screaming that they want one.
Source: parent who swore up and down that they were going to make their own purees, and immediately caved when they realized just how much gddmn*d food a 9 month old goes through in a week. I was sure I was going to be a hyper-organic, make everything fresh type parent, and now we give him frozen pancakes and squeeze pouches. It turns out that getting kids calories is hard enough without having to make it all yourself.
And them getting any calories is usually more important than me being super choosy about the composition of those calories. I was very proactive about all of this for quite a while but have relaxed somewhat as things evolve at home.
Also, many things fall into the not-ideal bucket. That doesn’t just mean the quality of the ingredients but also the specific food. Someone else mentioned chickpea pasta - and it’s great. But it’s also still partially processed. But because it’s not pure generic pasta, it’s ok? I don’t know.
I really prioritize the quality of things as much as possible rather than worrying in detail about whether they are metabolic superpowers or the opposite.
So why did you get them? If the children are so incredibly fussy that nothing else helps, sure, in rare cases you do whatever works to get them to eat anything. But most children can be reared without ever touching anything like that. I'm sure my four year old gets fed things I wouldn't choose at times, but those are rare exceptions, and at school, after school childcare, and before that day-care, this type of product is just not provided, nor condoned (parents are instructed to provide the child's lunch and fruit for school; parents who give the child a 'pouch' like that do get called out on that).
I don't think my kid even knows these exist.
> I do what I can to keep as much crap out of my house but some inevitably seeps in.
How? Unless your partner isn't on the same page, you are in control, right? The toddler certainly isn't buying groceries.
Most likely, they didn't know what would happen. Sure, "everyone knows" this stuff is not the best choice, but also every parent knows that at least half of what "everyone knows" is pure, unadulterated, value-negative bullshit.
Or, perhaps their well-meaning friends or relatives got the first pouch.
> in rare cases you do whatever works to get them to eat anything. But most children can be reared without ever touching anything like that
Sure, until the first time they taste the stuff.
We held off with sweets until our older one was ~3 y.o., but this is a feat you can't repeat with a younger sibling, unless you run some kind of ridiculously efficient home prison. Our younger one got up to speed with everything in terms of food and entertainment with her older sister, by then 4 y.o., simply because the latter was always happy to share.
I mean, we probably could've stopped it if we really tried. But this stuff isn't even particularly dangerous, unless someone leaks lead in the production, which is a failure mode you can't avoid even with homegrown vegetables. Otherwise, there's only so much effort we'd want to expend over bullshit fear-mongering.
Oh, also, a funny thing: we tried early on to substitute the shop-bought pouches with DIY ones - making various forms of smoothies and sludges and putting them in reusable pouches. Guess what, neither of our kids would take more than one sip of anything we made like this. Not that I blame them - obviously anything home-made tastes like shit compared to commercial equivalent, and even a 1.5 y.o. is able to tell when you're trying to substitute something they want with a fake.
> Unless your partner isn't on the same page, you are in control, right? The toddler certainly isn't buying groceries.
I wanted to say, "tell me you don't have kids without telling..." but I see you do, so let's use this as a reminder that parenting is high-variability occupation. We both have kids at the same age, and where for you this is a perfectly reasonable remark, it made me burst out laughing. I mean, 4 y.o. is the age where whenever two kids meet for more than 5 seconds, chances are they're sharing whatever food they have on hand...
I agree with a lot of what you said. It's easy to look at what I wrote and conclude: don't introduce pouches, easy. Be extremely deliberate in what you put on the table, easy.
I don't disagree with those things in concept. I'd love to execute a process every day that is perfection with respect to ingredient quality, time-spent, food consumed, etc. But I don't know a lot of people who somehow do all of this flawlessly - perhaps none in fact.
Also, what I didn't say is that you weigh what you want to control, how you want to impose rules with how much stress and anxiety you're willing to deal with in the process.
Suppose your kid cries for 30 minutes straight because they really want a pouch vs. chickpea pasta you've put in front of them. At some point, is that anxiety-inducing event worth it? Or, can you compromise sometimes with a pouch that helps everyone (kids, adults) get something they want.
> At some point, is that anxiety-inducing event worth it?
That's a very important question.
We've had a much easier time getting our younger daughter to eat proper meals at proper times than we had with our older one, and I think this was largely because we weren't as strict about it the second time around. Sure, she tasted some junk food a bit earlier than we'd like, but she also didn't get anxious about meal time like her older sister did at some point.
I know every kid is different and I don't blame parents for picky eaters, but kids pick up their habits of food at home very early, before they are old enough to get them at school or from other kids. My kids, who are older, have never heard of fruit pouches, and neither have I. If a kid won't eat what you put in front of them that's their temporary problem. Eventually, they will.
I know I had it easy. The first food my first child demanded was more broccoli. But I like to think that's partly because I put the broccoli on the table in the first place.
Eh, it's a fine theory but I have twins. One is the pickiest eater ever and getting her to eat is like an on-call sort of situation to be handled personally by mom or me. Her twin sister, these are 4 year olds, ate like 8 pieces of plain, steamed broccoli with her dinner last night. Her 2 year old brother is a great eater, too. The only difference (in routine and exposure to others) between the twin girls is that they're in different preschool classrooms. I've long suspected that she gets a lot of this behavior from other kids in her class.
As a parent one of the worst things you get to witness is your kids being assimilated into the machine. Nobody wants it. Many try to fight it. All will lose. We've all been assimilated into the machine to some extent.
My hope is that when my kiddo starts going to school that we can maintain eating relatively healthy stuff at our house by acknowledging that "junk" food (we're going to try to avoid that term so we don't assign morality to food) exists, and we can absolutely eat it, but that different foods make us feel differently, and eating too much of that kind of food can make you feel sick. I just hope it works.
We called it "party food": soda, chips, candy, cakes, etc. That's not regular food. You consume that at parties and even then don't eat too much - you'll get sick. My kids are adults now and they regulate themselves pretty well.
Toddlers can remain irrational longer than you can remain out of prison for starving them.
I had an extended period when I refused to eat anything at all except chocolate spread sandwiches. As an adult I'm not even sure where I would buy chocolate spread - is it near peanut butter? But my poor parents could either feed 4yo tialaramex chocolate spread sandwiches in that period or he'd go without food.
> Toddlers can remain irrational longer than you can remain out of prison for starving them.
Can I get this on a t-shirt to buy for every mom in my partner's mom group?? Jesus there is so much "you're giving your kids poison" type shaming in that group and it drives me nuts. It just stresses her out and doesn't help us out at all; we're lucky our kiddo eats just about everything (he loves frozen pancakes and applesauce pouches, but what can ya do?), so we just try to give him whatever we're eating. And we get so much flak for it. So what if the kid decides he wants to eat spaghetti four days in a row? It's calories in his body, which he needs a lot more than he needs fancy free-range blueberries picked under a full moon.
My first kid - great eater up until about age 1.5, then pandemic hits, and then everything became much more complicated for a variety of reasons.
My second kid - will eat really anything, but does show a preference for certain snacks which isn't surprising. But, also loves salmon, avocado, lentils.
My third kid (my wife - :) ) - A long-time carbs/cheese aficionado. Doesn't love a plate of broccoli or a bowl of lentils like I do.
I'm the strictest/healthiest eater by a large margin. At some point, you need some compromise in your system (my opinion, not suggesting for you)
I was VERY much in this camp. Worked great for two of my kids.
However, my third kid is absolutely willing to out-stubborn me on this one. She is a VERY picky eater (e.g., last night I had to fight with her to eat some food that she has eaten willingly before). If I let her she will simply go all day without eating rather than eating foods she doesn't want to eat. Not wanting her to be malnourished or develop an eating disorder, I pick my battles.
FYI you can make your own pouches at home! Buy reusable squeeze pouches online (fun styles and colors to entice the kid) and fill with whatever ingredients you'd like. My kid ate a mixture of store-bought and homemade throughout the pouch years.
Everyone who's saying "just don't introduce pouches..." either has the luxury of always being the child's caregiver or just hasn't gotten that far down the road. It's like frozen or fast food. At some point your kid will find out about it. Don't act like it doesn't exist, just offer a better alternative.
For all the shit we give Amazon, one thing I really appreciate about whole foods is that they have automated systems that will email you if something you bought is flagged as contaminated.
I got such an email for dried fruit that I bought for my toddler. I felt an indescribable amount of dread, because he ate a lot of it. We got him tested for lead levels and he came back fine, thankfully. In this case, it turned out that several samples in a batch came back elevated, and the recall was conducted out of caution.
I’m grateful that we take this stuff seriously, but we need to do better. It is abhorrent that contaminated products clear our existing tests and make their way to children.
What constitutes “fine”. Our daughter’s test went up 250% from the first test a year ago. The culprit seems to be cinnamon as she didn’t like cinnamon at 1 year, but at 2 years she’s more receptive to flavors
His pediatrician specifically ordered the test, examined it, and let us know we had nothing to worry about, so hopefully it wasn't that bad. All I know for now is that it was below the threshold you cited.
I'm sorry that that your daughter's test went up, I know that's soul crushing to see happen. When I was freaking out back when I got an email about contamination, I found a study that gave some perspective and made me feel a little better. Obviously for threshold of lead present in any food should be 0, and we should not be complacent, but look at the magnitudes for both the blood concentrations and deltas of IQ they're looking at here:
"A highly significant association was found between lead exposure and children's IQ (P < 0.001). An increase in blood lead from 10 to 20 micrograms/dl was associated with a decrease of 2.6 IQ points in the meta-analysis. "
Pretty much everyone picks food with heavy metals by taste. It's eve ("accidentally") added to e-cigarettes, to so that the people want to keep smoking.
I have two girls - ages 5, 22 months. They both love pouches. I don't love that they love pouches. But, if it comes down to eating/consuming anything vs. not, I'm often siding with consumption vs. nothing.
Of course, I can make food for them with high-quality ingredients, and do, but it is nearly impossible to force a kid to eat something you want them to eat vs. whatever it is they have in mind (like a pouch).
I do what I can to keep as much crap out of my house but some inevitably seeps in. And, tough to control the situation once they are mostly not at home (school, daycare, w/nanny/friends/etc.)
For what it's worth, we have these in my house: - https://lifewaykefir.com/family/probugs/ - https://siggis.com/categories/pouches - https://plumorganics.com/