It was a battle of wills, involving long hours sitting at the kitchen table, denying desserts, and trying out new combinations. I still remember, back when I was just a pipsqueak myself, the fights my own parents had with my sister to get her to eat full meals. I can relate to a point: Two year-olds are notoriously stubborn. And then what? Just gave up and accepted her child’s will as law? For 15 years? But are we really going to laugh it off and pretend this girl was breaking out of the house at two years-old to get her daily hit of “Nugs?” No, someone was there for years, fronting the bill at the Nugget Dealer du Jour.Įvonne, Stacey’s mother, “once tried starving Stacey to get her to eat more nutritious foods - but to no avail,” reports the U.K.’s Sun newspaper. OK, a 17 year-old with bad eating habits, I get that I was one of those. Inappropriately, it seems to me, few people are really taking notice of the fact that a 17 year-old girl who has eaten nothing but chicken nuggets every day for the past 15 years started her addiction when she was two. She suffers from anemia and swelling in the veins of her tongue, and has been told by physicians that if her diet does not include some legitimate variety soon she will almost certainly die young.Īppropriately, the girl’s mother is rather alarmed with the fact that her daughter is physiologically addicted to a single food item, generally accepted by nutritionists to be categorically terrible for you in large quantities. You may have already come across some of the viral news articles on 17 year-old Stacey Irvine on your own - the British teenager who ultimately collapsed and had to be hospitalized at the end of January as a result of her horrifying fast food diet.Įvery day for the 15 years, Irvine ate meals consisting of “practically nothing” but chicken nuggets, fries, and the occasional slice of toast or bag of potato chips. Here’s the short of it: we thank and reward parenting for the good traits that appear in children, but for bad traits and delinquencies, we’re quick to turn a blind eye and pretend parents have nothing to do with their children’s behaviour.Īnd now, a month later, we have an absolutely brilliant example of this parenting double-standard. Most people will agree that you can tell a lot about a person based on their children - for instance, a polite child implies a polite parent - but it seems to me to be something of an odd aspect of our society and culture to completely disregard undesirable traits in children as being either an absence of good traits or something inherently individual.” “It is my opinion that our children are a collective reflection of ourselves, both as individuals, and as a whole. In fact, just a little over a month ago I published an article that suggested society, as a whole, seems to have a fixation on seriously downplaying the role of the parent in the development of their children when that development turns sour. Youth delinquency is a theme that seems to crop up in my writing quite a bit and, in particular, the huge role that adults and parenting have to play in it.
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