Dear Stephen,

My daughter has a friend, let’s call her/him Kelly, and Kelly keeps telling my daughter that s/he is a boy. Kelly wears clothes that look like boy’s clothes, and has a haircut that makes her look boyish. My daughter accepts without question that Kelly is a boy. I like to think of myself as liberal and progressive, so I don’t want to overreact to this, and I actually smile when I think about my daughter being so accepting. But what should I do? When we talk about Kelly, should I refer to Kelly as “he” like my daughter does? Should I talk to the teacher, or Kelly’s parents, to see what I should do?

–Open-Minded Mom Who Worries About Stuff

Dear Open,

I smiled too when you told me about your daughter’s easy acceptance of Kelly’s gender-bending behaviors. And it’s nice of you to be concerned, to wonder what you should do about this problem…if it’s a problem. Here’s what I would do. First and foremost, or if all else fails, simply do nothing. It could be that Kelly is just experimenting with gender for one reason or another. Maybe her parents have liberated themselves from rigid gender roles and are deliberately trying to encourage their child to freely shape her own identity. They might be even more progressive than you! Whatever the case, it’s really not your affair.

But your own daughter is a different story. If you’re uncomfortable referring to Kelly as “he,” you could practice avoiding pronouns while allowing your daughter to say “he” and “him” all she wants. Or you could just go along with it. Kids try on lots of roles; as I’m sure you know, their identities are in flux. Trust your instinct that tells you not to pathologize Kelly and give your daughter lots of freedom to accept Kelly exactly as Kelly is. And, if you’re really interested or concerned about all of this, you could take this opportunity to talk with your daughter about gender. What’s a ‘girl’? What’s a ‘boy’? Your daughter will learn (whether you want her to or not!) that some people define gender only on the basis of sexual plumbing, but many others see gender as the complex, mysterious, and never-totally-understood phenomenon that it truly is.

Finally, you could learn more about the topic if you like. The link below might be a good book for you to learn more about sexuality and childhood.

Kelly is lucky that he has such a great friend in your daughter, and in you!

Like This Article? Please Bookmark It

Dear Stephen,

My six-year-old daughter refuses to eat anything except a few staples like noodles, waffles, PB&J and milk. We’ve tried offering her better food but she’d rather starve herself than touch it. She’s very set in her ways. What can we do?!?!

–Despairing Dad

Dear Despairing,

I once knew a kid who had followed your daughter’s path to the limit: he reduced his diet to chicken nuggets. That’s it. He avoided even the basics your daughter will eat. I suggested to his parents that they follow a regimen that I myself used to expand my own palette. It comes from an old article (1996) by Jeffrey Steingarten in Slate magazine. It works because you don’t have to get into a major power struggle with your daughter, and she doesn’t have to like the new food. She gets to take lots of time to learn to like it. Here’s how it works:

1. Have some fun with your daughter. Choose a time when she’s not really hungry and you’re not serving food, so there’s no immediate pressure for her to eat anything. Make a list with her of foods she thinks are really disgusting. Be creative and funny about it…squid, tripe (tell her what “tripe” is), haggis (intestinal lining! gross!!), a few other horrible foods, and then three or four fairly decent foods you’d like her to eat, such as broccoli, green beans, or chicken breast.

2. In that same meeting, make a list of your own. She’ll like to know that there are foods that you also think are disgusting. (If you have a gourmet palette and love all foods, then just fake it.) Make the same kind of list: things you would rather die than eat, and some things that are just outside your comfort zone. To make this step even more powerful, you could have everyone in the family make their own list, particularly a sibling she admires.

3. Let her know that you’re all going to do a little experiment. For ten days in a row, each of you is going to eat just one bite of one of the foods on your list. The other nine are off the menu for now. All of you will choose one of the foods on your list, and each day for ten days you will chew and swallow one bite of that food. She should know that it is perfectly okay for her to hate and despise this one bite. Depending on your ability to ham it up, you could make hating the bite fun, showing her how much you hate your bite with lots of theatrics. Then, for everyone who eats their one bite, there is a powerful reward (chocolate sundae, for instance). It’s okay if she doesn’t eat her one bite, but she’ll learn fast that whoever plays the game gets the sundae.

The point of all this, as noted in the article linked above, is that the human brain learns not to like certain foods. Most of our taste for foods is learned behavior. Sometimes we decide we hate lamb, for example, because we got food poisoning one time, and our brains remember that we ate lamb right around that time. It might have been the chicken sandwich we had for lunch that made us sick, but our brains can’t be convinced of that! They think, “oh, it was that lamb I had later on,” and they strike lamb off the list. Kids learn like this in smaller, more everyday ways. They’re naturally more sensitive to the little details of food–color, texture, temperature, taste–and far less experienced eaters, so they get snagged on lots of these little details. Then their brains lock in the learning: “green things are gross” is learned, and they become picky eaters.

The 10-day project is a re-training project. It gives your daughter’s brain a non-conflictual, fairly low-pressure chance to learn something new about, say, chicken breast. As she gets closer to Day 10, her brain will have adjusted to the chicken. It will have had a once-a-day shot at learning some new things about chicken: that it can be tender, and even tasty.

The kid I knew who hated everything but chicken nuggets was successful on this plan: he re-introduced a number of foods into his diet. The key is to be playful about it, be consistent, and keep it to a very narrow scope. One food item, one bite, once a day, followed by a reward, repeat nine more times. I suggest the Steingarten article if you’re still skeptical! And please write me back to let me know how it goes.

Happy eating,

Stephen

Like This Article? Please Bookmark It

Advice columns can be a great way to get insights and ideas about all kinds of problems. If you are worried about something that no one has asked about, please feel free to email me at stephen@stephencrippen.com with your own dilemma or question. I’ll keep it confidential, and do my best to help you out!

Like This Article? Please Bookmark It