When I was a little kid, my grandmother tried to make my sister and me eat really yucky prunes. I guess, now, as an adult, I understand why (something about regularity); but it’s an especially sadistic thing to do to a little kid. Not that she understood that, though. Back in her day, we weren’t the whiny, wimpy society we are today, where people get so offended by an off-color comment that everybody has to grovel in apologies and everybody gets fired. No, in those days, you were grateful to be alive and to have food to eat at all. She had lived through the depression, and to her, a yucky taste was something to “do it and like it”: as in: “You’ll eat it and like it!” (I’ll bet kids today don’t hear that very often anymore! But “Get off my lawn!” is a timeless classic to this day, I’d reckon.)
(BTW: My grandmother was awesome! This is the only wrong thing she ever did with me, so I hate to even mention it, but a packet of “organic” prunes I tried recently reminded me of this experience. Oh, and if you eat prunes, get the Trader Joe’s brand: they’re the best-tasting by far! Actually, they’re the only ones that aren’t awful!)
So why is it such a difficult thing to get kids to eat stuff they don’t like? It comes down to a simple thing, and it’s this: Kids don’t have experience with other sensory experiences so they can lessen the effects of bad taste. They don’t know about sex, they don’t drink alcohol, they don’t do drugs, they don’t have religious ecstasy, etc. They pretty much just have taste as their great experience and motivator. So for a kid, to taste something awful is like having a bad trip, or having a humiliating sexual experience. Remember that the next time you try to force your kids to eat yucky stuff they hate.
