Children are not only getting fat through unhealthy eating habits, they’re getting rude. Parked before the television and feasting on goodies, the wee ones also are losing their table manners.
They are, in fact, not even given a chance to develop mealtime civility, courtesy of a fast-food world with little regard for the traditional family dinner table.
A new British study of 2,000 mothers has found that solitary eating, casual or unsupervised meals in front of television, junky snacks and takeout food have created a new generation of uncouth youngsters.
Seven out of 10 of the mothers reported that their young children “pushed their dinner off the table and refused to eat.” Six out of 10 threw their food and half tried to climb down from their chairs and escape the meal altogether. Not to be outdone, four in 10 screamed their way through a culinary experience.
Sixty percent of the mothers said they “lose their patience during mealtimes.”
Behavior among the toddler set — children from 1 to 4 years old — has become “appalling” at the table, said the majority of moms surveyed by Mother & Baby, Britain’s best-selling parenting magazine, with a circulation of more than 700,000.
But the troubles seem to start with the mothers themselves. The survey had a name for the syndrome: “solitary toddler mealtime.”
A full 90 percent of the youngsters were allowed to eat junk food in front of television, often on their own. Almost half of them never even ate with the family.
Only 12 percent of the mothers said they regularly took their little ones out to eat; 42 percent said they never had taken their child to a restaurant.
Mother & Baby magazine called the trend a “recipe for disaster,” and pointed out the real health risks for the overfed, ignored toddlers: Half did not get recommended amounts of fruits and vegetables each day.
“Toddlers need the experience of sitting up at the table. It not only encourages them to eat properly, it improves their speech and social skills and encourages them to try new foods,” magazine editor Karen Pasquali Jones told the London Daily Telegraph.
“The amount of junk food toddlers eat is horrifying. They are the ’nuggets and chips’ generation,” she added.
This is not the magazine’s first foray with troubled toddlers. A similar survey of 2,000 British mothers last year found that many were turning their young children into “tiny teenagers.”
The study found that by age 3, 42 percent of toddlers had their own televisions, 50 percent their own compact disc players and two-thirds wore designer clothes.
It all resulted, Mrs. Jones said, in “volatile behavior.”
On these shores, the folks at the Vermont-based Emily Post Institute — a manners research and information center — concur that old-fashioned manners matter.
The group published a children’s etiquette guide — “The Gift of Good Manners” — in 2002.
The book cites a Public Agenda survey that found 84 percent of us “believe a major cause of disrespect in American society today” is caused by parental failure to teach basic manners.
“Manners education is inseparable from the other things a parent or primary caregiver must do to raise a responsible, self-sufficient child. It’s not a kind of add-on that be attended to after the schoolwork and the soccer, ballet and piano lessons are done,” writes co-author Peggy Post.
Manners are “vital to family integrity,” she states, and advocates that etiquette be taught from birth through adolescence.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.