Being a mother has never been more complex or competitive than it is today.
From the moment women conceive, society holds up a giant Motherhood
Scoreboard on which their performance is regularly noted. The hurdles are
endless, the judgments swift and unforgiving. Natural birth good; Caesarean
bad. Breast-feeding good; bottle bad. Back to work at six weeks? Very bad
indeed; giving up your job? Better. And so on.
A survey out today underlines the negative consequences of this. It turns out
that a staggering 76 per cent of mothers (out of a sample of 1,000) lie
about what they feed their children because they are worried that their
culinary efforts are not up to scratch. The poor dears are stressed out of
their heads that standard kiddie-tea fare of chips, beans and fish fingers
is just too awful by today’s enlightened standards, and so they throw in a
bit of broccoli, fib about the chips and hope that the fish fingers will
slip through the net of disapproval.
It’s hardly surprising. With increasing pressure from government and
interested parties, the negative messages about modern motherhood are enough
to drive anyone to desperation. In September the Archbishop of Canterbury,
Dr Rowan Williams, chastised the Government for making it too easy for women
to return to work, thus compromising the welfare of the family. Barely a
week later a group of eminent thinkers, including Baroness Greenfield and
the children’s author Jacqueline Wilson, wrote that childhood is being
foreshortened by a combination of junk food, school targets and
commercialism.
But while the arguments about the guilt of working mothers, extended nursery
hours and the like are open to debate, there is one area in which everyone
is unanimous: food. Feeding your offspring is one of life’s fundamentals,
along with shelter and health. Make a woman feel bad about the food she
feeds her kids, and she’ll feel like a failure.
Which is why the lies start early. Breastfeeding is the first. In Britain
expectant mothers are endlessly molested by the breast-feeding lobby,
desperate to ensure that they do their mammalian duty. Failing to
breast-feed your child can have terrible consequences, you are warned.
Others take a more pragmatic route: it’ll help you to lose weight (no it
doesn’t, you have to eat like a horse to keep up milk production and when
you finally do give up it’s hard to kick that one-bar-a-day Green &
Black’s habit).
It’ll help you to bond, is the other, which is true. But it can also be a
bond, which sometimes makes life impossible. So what do most women do? They
mix-feed. A bit of breast, a bit of bottle, with its miraculous
tummy-filling and sleep-inducing properties (a full baby is a happy baby, a
happy baby sleeps, oh joy). But the breast-feeding police hate this. It’s
all or nothing. Either you’re with them — or you’re a traitor.
And so when the nice health visitor comes round, you lie. You hide the Avent
bottles and the steriliser, secrete the ready-made cartons of Aptamil under
the sink, smile and lie. Baby is happily feeding on demand, you tell them.
Marvellous, they say, ticking their breast-feeding box. And everyone’s
happy.
After the breast-feeding comes the puréeing — and the lies start to grow. Good
mothers spend their weekends steaming and liquidising inventive combinations
of organic veg to freeze into ice-cube trays. Myself, I always relied on
Babylicious pre-packed purées, the saviour of many a working mother. But
even I, on occasion, resorted to decanting the ready-made stuff into
suitably earthy-looking containers, especially in the presence of
stay-at-home-mothers, a terrifying breed.
The competition is fierce. The more indigestibly foul the vegetable in
question, the better — the aim being to prove that your child has an
incredibly sophisticated palate, unsullied and unspoilt by sugar or salt. I
have watched in horror as friends have shoved the likes of swede, runner
beans and watercress down their poor infants’ gullets, all the while
protesting that “he normally loves his mung beans/watercress/akai”. They’re
lying, of course. Even fully grown adults don’t like mung beans.
As the children get older and start to interact with their peers, it gets
worse. Just as you don’t want to be the one whose children bring lice into
school, you also don’t want to be the mother whose child starts a craze for,
say, Findus Crispy Pancakes. The collective disapproval from the other
mothers is too much to bear, plus you don’t want your child to become a
social pariah. So you host ostentatiously well-catered play dates, serving
up hearty home-cooked food in the hope that no one mentions chips. And
everyone plays the game. So much for the Sisterhood.
That’s why those two renegade mothers from South Yorkshire who were discovered
pushing junk food through the school gates were, in their own way, so
refreshing. Not because they were feeding their kids lard (even I don’t
think that’s a good idea), but because they were sticking two fingers up at
a culture that puts far too much pressure on women to be perfect mothers, a
culture in which the prevailing view of a privileged minority is foisted
upon the majority, and women’s inability to live up to impossible standards
is causing them not just inordinate amounts of stress but turning them into
liars.
And besides, why is everyone always so quick to blame us mothers? Children, as
a wise man once said, are as crafty as a box of monkeys. You may control
their bedtimes, their pocket money and their access to Mutant Ninja Turtle
telly, but unless you believe in force-feeding, they have ultimate control
over what they put in their mouths.
And don’t they know it: those supposedly innocent cherubs can drive you nuts
by going whole days without consuming a proper meal. As a form of parental
manipulation it’s not subtle, but it is hugely effective. After two days of
low-blood-sugar-induced tantrums, you’ll give anything to get them to eat,
including chips. If it makes you feel better, you can always say they’re
oven-baked.
Junk foods that you don’t have to lie about
Fish fingers
Fast, easy and children love them — which makes it hard to believe that they
can be good for you. But choose the right brand, grill them instead of
frying, and they can be full of nutrients.
Most big supermarkets can be relied on to use good-quality cod in their
own-brand products, and Birds Eye claims to use only cod fillet. With nearly
65 per cent of each fish finger consisting of cod, a serving of three for
dinner will give 170 calories, 12g of protein (children aged 7-10 need 28g a
day) and just 7g of fat, of which only 1g is the artery-clogging saturated
type. With less than a gram of salt (the daily maximum is 5g), fish fingers
even score well on this front, and the Birds Eye product contains no
artificial additives, either.
Serve with frozen peas for vitamin C, fibre and energy-boosting iron, and
mashed potato. Even a blob of ketchup will do no harm — it is rich in
lycopene, an antioxidant that is good for the eyes, skin and heart.
Chips
The rule here is, the fatter the chip, the better. Thick-cut chips from a chip
shop will have 394 calories per typical 165g serving. While this hardly
makes them a “health” food, they are an improvement on the thin-cut French
fries from burger bars, which absorb more fat while cooking so you end up
with 512 calories and 28g of fat in a similar serving. The most prudent
advice is to buy the thick-cut type and share a portion between two
children.
Best of all, you can make your own chips at home by brushing potato wedges
lightly with oil before baking at 230C/Gas 8 for 40 minutes. Alternatively,
try Marks & Spencer’s Chunky Chips, which have 160 calories and just
2.4g of fat per half a 300g pack.
Chips also provide up to 15mg of vitamin C (half the amount that a
ten-year-old needs each day) in a 165g portion, so you can even get away
with serving oven chips several times a week.
Chicken nuggets
Buying six standard nuggets from a high street fast-food bar is the worst
option, as you have no idea about the quality of chicken used and they will
certainly be fried. Expect to find 269 calories and 13g of fat per six
nuggets.
But you can still give your children chicken nuggets with pride. Sainsbury’s
has launched a healthy version — Sainsbury’s Kids Chicken Nuggets — that are
almost 60 per cent chicken breast. Calorie-wise they are similar to
fast-food versions but the quality is guaranteed and they are free of
artificial colours and flavours, and trans fats.
Served with baked beans for fibre and slow-release energy, with a small salad
of tomatoes and cucumber, chicken nuggets need not be off limits.
Pizza
Deep-pan, meat-topped pizzas with cheese-filled crusts are so calorie-dense
that a ten-year-old boy would get more than his recommended daily 1,970
calories in one pizza. Hawaiian-style pizza with lean ham and pineapple is
usually the best option, though one slice (about 100g) of Pizza Hut’s
medium-pan version has 245 calories and 8g of fat, plus a fairly hefty 1.3g
of salt. Try to persuade a child that one slice is enough and to have it
with a salad.
A better option is Marks & Spencer’s Ham and Pineapple Pizza, which has
210 calories and 5.5g of fat per 100g slice, though it still contains nearly
1.3g of salt. The guilt-free option is to buy a 100g individual thin pizza
base, spread it with tomato purée and top with 25g of lean ham slices,
chunks of fresh pineapple and 20g of reduced-fat cheddar.
Burgers
How bad for you is a burger? That depends on its size and what is served with
it. The quarter-pounder with cheese is the worst of the lot, with at least
450 calories and 23g of fat whichever burger bar you choose. A
straightforward hamburger has just 255 calories and 10g of fat.
While major chains insist that they use only good-quality beef in their
burgers, you have no idea of quality when buying from independent outlets.
To give your children the best, head for Waitrose (or order online if you
have no branches close to home). Its Organic Beef Burgers are made with 92
per cent British organic beef, and the only additive is vitamin C as an
antioxidant. They contain no egg, soya, nuts or milk and have 226 calories
per 85g burger.
You can serve this — or your own home-made version — with a multigrain roll,
sliced and toasted gently with some big slices of tomato, lettuce and a
little tomato relish for a filling, iron-packed meal.
Chocolate
Chocolate is full of fat and sugar, so it is also packed with calories. A 50g
bar has 260 calories (and contains about seven teaspoons of sugar), so it
has to be an occasional treat rather than a daily snack.
That said, from a dental point of view chocolate is a much better option than
toffees or boiled sweets. The cocoa fractions in chocolate reduce the
activity of the decay-causing bacteria in our mouths, whereas the sugar in
sweets encourages such bacterial activity, lowering the pH of the mouth and
triggering the erosion of tooth enamel, which leads to decay.
Dark chocolate, if you can wean children on to it, is also a good supplier of
cocoa flavanoids — antioxidant supernutrients that appear to protect our
hearts and even to have an anti-cancer effect.
As moderation is the key when it comes to chocolate, it is worth seeking out
the Green & Black’s organic box containing individually wrapped
bite-size squares of dark, milk and white chocolate that have just 25
calories and 1.6g of fat per square. Alternatively, you could do worse than
to buy Cadbury’s Dairy Milk Buttons in treat-size bags, at 75 calories per
bag.
AMANDA URSELL
