Parenting

I'm sitting here at the computer watching game 7 of the Stanley Cup finals on CBC Sports online. That's hockey for those not in the know. It's around this time every year where I get a bit of a hankering for TV. In fact it is kind of ironic that I now miss TV for the sake of hockey, because when I was a young kid I actually quit minor hockey at about the age of 7 because I was so addicted to TV that I did not want to miss my Saturday morning cartoons, and that is when hockey practice was. And I went through pretty much most of the rest of my life majorly addicted to the Tube - watching it for the sake of watching it.

Until we had our first kid. Actually it was a bit by accident how we decided to turn of the Tube for good. Most of you in North America at least will recall the massive east-coast blackout we had in 2003. Our youngest son was about 15 or 16 months old at the time, and we'd already been discussing the possibility of just cancelling our dish and getting rid of TV because we did not like the idea of our kids being exposed to all that advertising, not to mention the addiction. When we were forced to go a day or so without TV because of the blackout, we realised and were actually very surprised how easy it was to do. So without any 2nd thoughts we called and cancelled, and sold the dish. And have not looked back.

I just convinced my 7 year old to eat some par-cooked (blanched) carrots, and it struck a note with me that we've used a number of techniques over the years to get our boys to try new foods. In this case my wife had purposely only par-cooked the carrots so they would have a crunchiness to them still - our oldest loves raw carrots but will not eat them cooked. This was a perfect "gateway technique" to get him eating cooked carrots too. It took a while to convince him to try the first carrot, but once he did, he was fine and ate it all.

Perhaps one of the most unscrupulous "gateways" we've introduced were the notorious "supper timbits". I had gotten an idea that since the boys (about 3 and 5 at the time) loved Tim Horton Timbits so much, that we should deep fry our falafel instead of making burgers, and tell the boys they were "supper timbits". It worked like a charm and now we basically can introduce any food by using the "gateway" of deep frying it into a ball the first time we feed it to them. Sure, deep fried foods are terrible if they eat them every day, but much as we love ours, it is still limited to 2 or 3 times a month so this is just fine for growing boys who are otherwise active (which many their age are not these days)