Our children’s book has been a little while coming and while it will be a little longer before it is in stores (you can order your advance copy by clicking here) what we are really excited about is the song! Two really talented, brilliant performers – singer Jenny Wilson and musician Sean Peter – have just sent us their first cut of the Taste with your face song. One of the big issues for adults is that we ‘forget’ how to eat mindfully and savour our food – this is what the song is all about. While kids are much better at being present in the moment than us adults, we need to make sure that we don’t let them lose this wonderful skill. Mind you, while kids are better than adults at being present-centred, they also need help to keep focussed! Click here to have a listen:  The Taste with your face song. Please do us a favour and give us your feedback by clicking on ‘Comments’ below. If your computer has problems playing it then you can right click on it and first save it to your computer (e.g. to Desktop) and then play it from there.

Following my last post, I looked at a recent Australian study of 324 four-year-olds. While one in five of these youngsters were overweight or obese, 83% of their mothers did not think they were! The study, lead by Michele Campbell*goes to the heart of our complicated psyche. These mothers were not ‘bad mothers’, this is something I see all the time in adults whether it’s their obesity or their child’s – this is our mind keeping us from seeing and feeling painful information. This is the first and foremost role of our unconscious – to keep us safe from emotional pain.

Generally mothers were more concerned about daughters than sons – presumably because it’s okay to be a ‘big and strong’ boy. All parents should, at least once a year, check their children’s position on the ‘BMI for age’ chart (see the previous post).

*Maternal concern and perceptions of overweight in Australian preschool-aged children. Medical Journal of Australia, 2006.

I recently read a well-balanced article on this contentious subject in the Los Angeles Times (December 21) by Amina Khan. In the first case of its kind, in June 2009 a South Carolina mother, Jerri Gray lost custody of her son, Alexander, after being charged with criminal neglect. At the age of 14 he weighed 555 pounds (252kg). Ms Gray is facing 15 years on two felony counts. Other parents have been told to demonstrate progress in helping their children to lose weight or risk losing them.

Should parents be held responsible for their child’s obesity? The proponents of advertising junk food to children argue that what children eat should not be controlled by regulation, by a ‘national nanny’, it should be up to parents to ultimately decide what their children eat.  But can they? Can parents compete with the one billion dollars spent each year on the estimated 30,000 advertisements their children will be influenced by? Can parents compete with cheap junk food being available at every turn? It’s a  simple idea to blame and charge parents – but ‘simple’ is the only word I can find to explain the attraction of charging parents with abuse – pity that obesity is an incredibly complex pyschophysiological condition.

To my mind, we can’t blame parents until we first give them the resources they need to do the job properly and then they fail to use them. They need a lot of help. Government need to help them by treating the marketing of foods to children in exactly the same way as they treat the marketing of cigarettes and alcohol to children and teenagers – for exactly the same reasons! Excess food, like excess alcohol, is dangerous to the health of our precious children. Secondly, parents need help in how to create healthy eating habits in their children – while our work is obviously all about this – we are at the beginning of a very long haul and we need lots of help.

Let’s remember exactly why it is that we don’t advertise cigarettes and alcohol to children and why we don’t rely just on parents to discourage kids from smoking and drinking …

I’m really pleased that my wife, Penny, who did so much to make my first book a success, has agreed to co-author these children’s books with me. My wife and I have had a lot of fun (mostly) finalising the first book in our Food Loving Kids series. It has just gone off to the printer in the UK for a pre-Christmas release over there. It will be out in Australia in March 2010 (to find out the latest on this just subscibe to this site as I will be posting updates as we get closer to the release date.)

The first book, Taste with your face: Adventures in healthy eating, is all about teaching children to savour their food. Tasting with your face, rather than just your mouth, is about using your eyes and nose as well. In this way we come fully into the now to get maximum tasting pleasure – remember, we eat more because we taste less. By tasting more, it becomes so much easier to eat less.

I say ‘mostly’ had a lot of fun, because when I’m writing I normally only have myself to argue with. I could ask an opinion of someone and if I didn’t like what I heard, I could go away and do it my way. Not so now …

Today, driving to work, I had this troubling insight come to me. … I’ve realised Penny has this extremely annoying habit - she significantly improves any work I do!