photo by: Contributed

Georgia Garvey

“This is junk food, Mommy.”

That’s what my 6-year-old told me as he sat down to his pre-swimming lesson snack. I’d given him peanut butter pretzels, fruit snacks and a piece of leftover Halloween candy.

“It’s bad for me, and I’ll get tired in a half-hour,” he went on, starting to cry. “I don’t want to get tired in a half-hour.”

As I talked to him, it came out that he’d had a lesson in school about “junk food” in which the kids were told all the bad things they might want to but should not eat and how terrible it would be for them to have food like pizza, hot dogs and chips. These are all sprinkled into our dinner and lunch rotations at home, and my first-grader was now wondering why his mother would feed him food that’s bad for him.

I sighed.

This isn’t the first time one of my kids has come home, repeating criticisms they hear at school of what they’re eating or have eaten.

My first instinct is to defend myself — I mean, they eat eggs and olive oil and seaweed and whole grain bread and strawberries and carrots, too — but I try to check myself when I can. It doesn’t really matter that they have as balanced diets as I can manage and that their limited palates will allow.

That’s irrelevant.

Even if they were solely fed a diet of fast-food french fries and caffeinated soda, I would have my reasons for doing it. Maybe one of my children is underweight and won’t eat anything else. Maybe he’s allergic. Maybe I work three jobs and am a single mother and don’t have time to shop or cook.

But all of that is irrelevant, too.

What is relevant is that the choice of what to feed my child is mine and my husband’s, and ours only. It isn’t teachers’ or schools’ jobs to shame parents via their kids about food choices, and even less their job to shame children about the food they’re given, which is beyond their control.

I have very strong opinions about not setting kids up for a lifetime of negative feelings about food. I believe that exposing children to things like fat, sugar and salt (while giving them balanced options) is important in creating people who will voluntarily moderate their food choices as adults.

“You are going to make them chocolate addicts!” my father said once when he saw the bowl of treats in our house, sitting out on the counter.

“What made you a chocolate addict?” I responded, for I know my father grew up in such abject poverty that he could not conceive of a weekly or monthly (sometimes even yearly) sugary treat. He now can hardly control himself around chocolate cakes and candies, stuffing himself even if he’s already full from dinner. It was not the excess of availability that made him so; it was the dearth of exposure.

My children know that there are chips, juice boxes and candy in the house. Sometimes we have sugary soda around. They can always ask, and often are allowed, to grab some for themselves, especially after they’ve eaten dinner or at a reasonable time for a snack or drink.

I realize that other parents (and increasingly, teachers at school) may judge me for that, but they likely don’t realize that I judge them for judging me. I judge them for restricting children to the point that the kids gorge themselves on sweets and sugary drinks and salty snacks whenever they get the chance. I think it’s possible that they may be raising children who will forever feel guilt about even minor indulgences.

I also feel that children shouldn’t be given fat-free or sugar-free food and drinks, for I know that research shows those who drink full-fat milk, for example, are healthier than those who drink skim. I’m not sure how good it is for developing brains to taste something that seems sugary but isn’t. I think kids need a complex diet that includes protein, fat and carbohydrates to power their voracious brains and bodies.

But the reason those “healthy eating” fanatics probably don’t know that I’m judging them for their choices is that those are just my beliefs, and I don’t feel compelled to discuss them with anyone but my husband. Like the famous saying about rear ends goes: Opinions. We’ve all got ’em.

It’s no different than having beliefs about politics, beliefs about religion. I wouldn’t want a schoolteacher or friend or relative or random stranger to lecture me about those, either.

Because no matter how certain you are that you’re right, I’m equally certain that I am. And we all have the best interests of our children in mind. We all want them to be healthy, to thrive. We all want good things for them.

Even if those good things are sometimes called “junk food.”

So, maybe lay off on the judgment, and I promise to lay off on mine. What do you say? Do we have a deal?

— Georgia Garvey is a syndciated columnist with Creators.