Every step of being a parent is about letting go.

 

 

Whether its putting them on the school bus for the first time, or their first solo drive in your car, you can’t help but feel happy, proud, and scared all at once.

This week, my eldest daughter left for the West coast. She’s finished with college,  and worked hard all summer saving up a sizable sum of money to help her with securing a place to live in pricey San Francisco.  She’s a grown up now. Whew!

One thing I won’t have to worry about while she is on the other side of the country, is if she is eating well. She will be, she has the skills and the Food IQ to nourish herself and have fun in the process. One of the reasons she choose to move to San Francisco was for its vibrant food culture and abundance of farmer’s markets.

Our kids can be our muses, causing us to contemplate things we might have never thought of. This is the kid who came home from school with candy wrappers in her backpack way back in the late 1990’s. That little incident along with a string of others  caused me to get involved with school lunch and ultimately to change careers from dentist to holistic nutritionist and food activist.

After those fateful Fruit Roll-ups, I fell down the rabbit hole of school food advocacy and dedicated more than a decade of my energy to advocate for better school food both near and far. I learned more than I ever wanted to know about how the food system in our country works. In my opinion, when it comes to transforming school food, I was unsuccessful. The baked chips, sports drinks and silly lowfat chocolate milk remain.  But here at home with my own three kids, its another story. I think they’ve learned enough about food to be able safely navigate the toxic food environment and to lead a healthy life.

My eldest bird who has just left the nest did not gain an understanding of food from eating at public school or even in college. Nutrition curriculum in K-12 was completely useless in her evolution as a healthy eater.

Here are 7 steps that helped to raise a young adult with a solid Food IQ and ability to cook for herself.

1. Slow and Steady Wins the Race.  The food situation changes with every stage of the game. Building your child’s Food IQ is a marathon, not a sprint. The game continually changes as kids get older. You’ve got to be in it for the long run and you’ve got to walk the talk yourself. It takes time and effort, there are no shortcuts.

2. Let Go Of Perfection. Your kids won’t eat clean 100% of the time, and neither will you! That’s OK. You can make solid rules for your own home, but outside of there, you’ve got to face it: whether you like it or not, your kids will eat their fair share of junk! I learned that it is important for them to experience for themselves what its like to eat crappy and feel crappy.

3. Real Food- We never counted calories or contemplated calcium or other nutrients. We just stuck to good food. The real stuff, made from scratch, bought close by whenever possible. I did have strict rules about what was not allowed in our house: hazardous ingredients like hydrogenated oils, artificial sweeteners and unpronounceable chemicals.  Over time, my kids learned about each one of those ingredients and why they were hazardous.

4. Family dinner- We ate real food at home more often than not. Somehow we found time to eat together as a family most nights of the week.  Everyone helped with getting dinner on the table, either preparing food, cooking or cleaning up. We all realized that the best food came from home, not from a “fine dining experience”.

5. Clean, filtered water was the #1 beverage at the Rubin Rodeo. Soda, juice and silly sports drinks were never part of the plan. We did invest in a SodaStream to make seltzer with. None of my kids ever developed a taste for soda as a result.

6. Its Not About Weight We never had a scale in our house, the number on a scale really doesn’t mean anything. The over emphasis on weight and not health can really backfire, especially with girls. The media distorts female body images on a regular basis, we certainly talked at length about that one!

7. Teach Your Kid to Cook- I often make jokes about child labor in the kitchen, I highly recommend teaching double digit aged kids knife skills and all sorts of cooking skills. As they got older, they were able to make a meal or two on their own from start to finish. Many of the recipes on this blog were put here for my college age daughters to use as a reference when cooking away from home. Cooking from scratch is a key skill to eating healthy and appreciating real food.  Your kid’s health is an inside job: it starts in the kitchen!

Even though my biggest girl is all grown up and thousands of miles away, she is never all that far thanks to technology.  We  get a kick out of  seeing her photos of food from far and wide. She loves to post on Instagram and even texts me a snapshot of her dinner from time to time.  From the looks of her photos, she’s eating better than the rest of us are!