Have We Made it Too Hard For Families to Be Healthy?
American parents are busier than ever. American children are less healthy than ever. And the American environment makes it almost impossible to avoid this fate.
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My wife, Neely, seems to like me better during the summer. She and I talk more, we laugh more, and we do more of the little things to show each other that we care. The reason for this is obvious. Neely is an elementary school PE teacher. She spends most of the school year in a state of constant exhaustion.
It is hard to fully grasp what it’s like to have 40 five-year-olds in a gym.
40 children with no attention span, no common sense, and no front teeth.
40 children who are always picking their noses, crying, and asking for help tying their shoes.
40 children who want to tell you every minute detail of their lives and who literally believe that they are the center of the universe.
I am amazed that any adult would willingly choose this profession, but Neely claims to love it.
Still, it’s not just this job that exhausts Neely. Yes, she is exhausted from work, but she is also exhausted from running our household. She’s exhausted from managing the lives of our 6-year-old and our 5-year-old, and from the sheer psychic toll of holding the entire family operation together.
I do my best to help—food prep, yard work, cleaning bathrooms, reading books to the kids, and all that jazz. But I’m gone for work before the kids get up and I don’t get home until a couple hours after they finish school. Consequently, Neely’s daily schedule throughout the school year looks something like this:
Wake up and work out
Wake our kids up
Feed our kids
Repeatedly prompt our kids through all the steps to be ready for school
Take our kids to school
Teach elementary school students for 8 hours
Work the elementary school car line
Take our kids home
Prompt our kids through all the steps to put their school stuff up (repeated redirection required)
Determine where each kid left their jacket, or water bottle, or…
Sift through all the papers that have been sent home in each kids’ folder
Make the next day’s lunches
Make dinner
And then I come in for the responsibility hand off.
On top of all this, Neely is constantly juggling a thousand other tasks—grocery lists, cleaning, laundry, keeping track of school assignments, scheduling the kids’ events, and all the other tasks that, disproportionately, fall on American moms.
I hesitate to mention my daily part, as it doesn’t compare. But I understand where Neely is coming from, because even my small slice feels hectic when placed on top of my career. I wake up, clear the dishwasher, and prepare the kids’ breakfast. I come home and clean the kitchen, make my lunch, take out the trash, feed the dog, turn off every light in the house (pro tip: check the closets), and then I try to be present for my kids before prodding them through their bedtime routine.
So many working parents find themselves in a similar state of incessant busy-ness.
Whenever I speak to groups of parents, the most consistent feedback I hear is that parents are simply overwhelmed. The number of time commitments, from birthday parties, to evening school programs, to the intensity of youth sports expectations, has only expanded, and parents have less free time than ever to get it all done.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2022 both parents worked in 65% of married couple households with children, up from 53% in 2011. This could be seen as a mark of progress for women, but for many parents it is simply a necessity. To live in good neighborhoods with decent schools, both parents often have to work. Which means that parents have to fit all the responsibilities that are vital to their family’s daily operation—all the errands, chores, appointments, and pickups—into just a few hours outside of work.
Given their overwhelm, it is no wonder that most parents don’t worry too much about what is healthy. After all, their parents didn’t.
Hear Me Out…
Now, I realize I may have lost you by mentioning that whole health thing. I’m the guy who bikes to work and trains athletes for a living. It would be easy to typecast me as one of those seed oil obsessed health freaks and, thus, to dismiss my concerns out of hand. But you shouldn’t have to be a Crossfitter or a vegan in order to sympathize.
Over the last forty-five years, childhood obesity rates have more than quadrupled in America, rising from 5 percent in 1978 to a whopping 22 percent in 2021. Part of the issue is that kids are moving and playing less—a consequence of our entertainment saturated culture. But the way we feed our children is at least as much of the problem.
Over the last few decades, eating norms have changed drastically in America. We’ll discuss the causes later, but, first, I want to establish that every realm of our kids’ lives, from youth sports (where kids consume more calories from their post game snacks than they burn while playing) to school cafeterias, has made the default choice an unhealthy one. And parents are too busy and tired to swim against the tide.
Too Busy to Be Healthy
To serve healthier meals, you have to spend a lot more time preparing food. Busy parents can save a lot of time by putting health on the backburner. This isn’t necessarily a conscious decision. Parents don’t decide that they want to serve less healthy food. They just do what is normal and convenient.
When you do what is normal:
You don’t have to spend hours prepping meals every weekend
You don’t have to prepare healthy breakfasts that are hard to eat on the run
You don’t have to make lunches and dinner each night
If you do make lunch and dinner, you can save time with pre-packaged, convenience items such as Lunchables, Doritos, Hot Pockets, and Pizza Rolls
You don’t have to cajole your kids to eat their vegetables
And you don’t have to spend time exercising
Most parents save hours of time, money, and frustration each week by serving quick convenience staples for breakfast and lunch. Or, they make it even easier by giving their kids money to use at the school cafeteria.
How Our Eating Norms Changed
Decades of clever marketing has convinced most parents that eating this way is normal or, at the very least, that these foods are all you can expect a kid to eat. But there is nothing normal about most of the food that we serve in our cafeterias or that we tend to classify as “Kids’ Foods.” In fact, feeding children this way would have seemed bizarre just a few generations ago. But American eating norms gradually began to change following the industrial revolution, and then again with the marketing revolution that followed World War II.
Over the last seventy years, a number of brilliant marketing campaigns helped the Food Giants (companies like Kraft, Nabisco, General Mills, and Mars) to transform America’s eating habits. They targeted mothers with easy meals that promised to free mom from long hours in the kitchen. They targeted kids with flashy ads, Play Places, and cereal mascots like Tony the Tiger, Count Chocula, and a silly rabbit who didn’t understand that Trix were for kids. And, perhaps most significantly, they infiltrated our schools who could not resist the promise of easy money from vending machines, soda contracts, and Box Tops for Education.
In addition to these ploys, they did their best to promote confusion and misinformation. Take this prominent ad campaign from the 1960s and 70s, which told American parents that their children needed more sugar in order to thrive…
Not just that. Sugar, they were told, could help them get thin…
Similarly, when heart disease rates became national news, the Food Giants created a line of low fat and no fat alternatives. By increasing sugar, they were able to cut the fat, keep the taste, and convince many that muffins, cookies, and sugary cereals were now healthy options. This helped spur a precipitous rise in obesity and diabetes.
The same ploys are evident today. Take a look at any Coca-Cola or Pepsi machine and you’ll see a prompt to “Balance what you eat, drink & do”—the soda companies' subtle way of suggesting that a 150 calorie cola is no big deal. Just take the stairs or cut back later.
Over time, campaigns like these helped to transform America’s eating habits and paved the way for our convenience food lifestyle.
By now, most Americans are well aware that our ultra-processed diets aren’t healthy. But these foods are still what most Americans consider “normal,” especially for their children. Most of us don’t appreciate just how dramatically our most popular foods have been altered from anything that would resemble “normal” food. For example, this anecdote from Micheal Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma (p.117) shows what you are actually eating when you get a typical McDonald’s meal:
“I asked Todd Dawson, a biologist at Berkeley, to run a McDonald’s meal through his mass spectrometer and calculate how much of the carbon in it came originally from a corn plant. It is hard to believe that the identity of the atoms in a cheeseburger or a Coke is preserved from farm field to fast-food counter, but the atomic signature of those carbon isotopes is indestructible, and still legible to the mass spectrometer…
…In order of diminishing corniness, this is how the laboratory measured our meal: soda (100 percent corn), milk shake (78 percent), salad dressing (65 percent) chicken nuggets (56 percent), cheeseburger (52 percent), and French Fries (23 percent). What in the eyes of the omnivore looks like a meal of impressive variety turns out, when viewed through the eyes of the mass spectrometer, to be the meal of a far more specialized kind of eater. But then, this is what the industrial eater has become: corn’s koala.”
Today, this meal would seem normal, while kids whose parents pack them carrots and hummus for lunch feel like the weird ones. Our society has committed war against cigarettes, but we seem oblivious to the fact that we actively ingrain eating habits in our children that are comparably harmful.
According to the 2015-2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans Report, “About half of all American adults have one or more preventable, diet-related chronic diseases, including cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and overweight and obesity.” 41.9% of adults were obese, as of 2023, and this number is only poised to grow. In fact, a 2016 Harvard study projected that over 57% of youth between the ages of 2 and 19 would be obese by the time they were 35.
The consequences go far beyond bodyweight stigmas and vanity. The Commonwealth Fund found that, when compared with comparable high income countries, The United States has the lowest life expectancy, the highest rate of people with multiple chronic conditions, and the highest death rates for avoidable conditions.
This is not a kind trajectory to place our kids on. You’d never put a cigarette in your kid’s lunch box with a note that said:
Good luck on your spelling test! I know you’ll smoke the competition!
And yet we have no qualms about our schools serving kids Confetti Pancakes, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, and chocolate milk at the start every day. In fact, during the Covid-19 pandemic, the taxpayers provided these to all American children, free of charge.
How to Program a Generation For Abysmal Health
Enter our schools and you’ll find what appears to be an almost deliberate attempt to instill habits that will take years from our children’s lives and resign them to decades of poor health. PTA parents sell cookies and Chick-Fil-A biscuits in the halls; teachers make a practice of rewarding their students with candy; and the FCA attracts students by giving away Sticky Buns and Oatmeal Cream Pies at the door.
Every fund-raiser sells candy or cookies, every hallway has a vending machine, and every school event is promoted with the promise of ice cream, donuts, or pizza. This is to say nothing of what we serve in the cafeteria.
Last year, my kindergarten son, Ace, would go to lunch every day and watch his friends eat pizza or nachos. Then, he’d watch as they went to get ice cream after they’d finished. I’m not making this up. Our school cafeterias sell ice cream to kindergartners every day.
Lunch time was, of course, torture for Ace. To the six-year-old brain, there is no greater pleasure than eating ice cream and no greater pain than watching all your friends chow down on a “Cookie N Cream Cone” without you. We tried to help Ace understand the benefits of healthy eating and to take pride in what he was doing for his body and mind. But he is six. He just wants sugar.
The scenario is similar to if a high school sold its male students private dances from strippers every day. You, the parent, are put in an insane situation where you have to try to make your fifteen-year-old son feel better about being the only guy who doesn’t get a dance from Trixie before algebra. There’s not much you can say that will make this any easier on Johnny.
If these comparisons to cigarettes and the teenage sex drive seem hyperbolic, consider this. A 2013 study from Connecticut College showed that rats who were offered Oreos spent as much or more time consuming Oreos as they did when they were offered cocaine or morphine. More still, they found that the Oreos stimulated even more neurons in the rat’s “pleasure center” than cocaine or morphine.
In a Sane World, Parents Would Have Help
Oreos, like most of the food that we feed children today, are far from biologically normal. These are complex chemistry experiments that distort our palates and stoke excessive eating. Still, I am not arguing that families should not be allowed to feed their children Oreos, Pop-Tarts, or anything else on the a la carte menu above. In fact, my children have tried most of that stuff.
What I’m arguing is that it is insane for our schools to make these the default food choices.
It is insane for our schools to create an environment that virtually ensures our children will develop a dysfunctional relationship with food and that they will struggle with health throughout their lives.
It is insane that busy parents have to go out of their way to help their children overcome the influence of the school environment.
In a sane world, the only kids who’d have to bring lunch from home are those whose parents wanted them to eat Cheetos, nachos, and ice cream sandwiches for lunch. Which brings me back to my original point…
Parents are overwhelmed, often confused, and constantly placed in situations that make it nearly impossible for them to do what is best for their kids. In almost every parenting scenario, the default path is unhealthy. This is most apparent and indefensible in the case of our schools.
Schools have a duty to promote the best interest of our children and our communities. They have a duty to understand the needs of our time and to prepare children accordingly. It is time they wake up to the health crisis that they have helped perpetuate.
Right now, the majority of our children are expected to be obese before they reach middle age. It isn’t enough just to tell parents that our foods are killing us.
If we actually want to see improvements in American health, we have to make it easier for parents to raise healthy kids, not harder. If the health and vitality of future generations depends upon parents working against the schools, then more and more children will be condemned to lives of poor health, lethargy, and physical limitation. This is gross negligence at a national scale.
Thank you for reading and sharing this post! I hope you’ll be motivated to share this with youth sport leagues, schools, FCAs and the many other youth-focused organizations that should be leading the effort to change these norms.
Carry the fire!
Shane
Thanks for sharing Shane!