But here’s something new: yet another “parenting cliche” piece by me, but this one never appeared anywhere! The Wall Street Journal commissioned it as a Thanksgiving piece but never ran it (not their fault), then had me re-write it as a New Year’s piece…and didn’t run it again (their fault this time).
Once again we have survived the holidays, a season marked, especially in this country, by a studied excess of everything: too much food, too much drink, too much shopping, too much family, too much football, too much Mannheim Steamroller.
For children, the festivities also bring another kind of excess: an excess of well-meaning–but completely bonkers–adult advice. It’s one of the dirty little secrets of parenting that moms and dads always sound the most authoritative when they’re standing on the shakiest factual ground. Is it really bad for our children to swallow their gum, or crack their knuckles, or go swimming after they eat? We don’t know, and we don’t really care. We suffered through these endless warnings as kids, and now we’re going to pass them along with exactly the same conviction. We can’t show the slightest bit of doubt, because we know the kids will pounce if we do. They’re like bears, or bees, or something. You have to stand your ground.
Children face this litany of grown-up killjoy-ism year-round, of course. But the sheer volume of slightly harried adults gathering during the holidays means that there’s going to be more misinformation than usual being passed around the table along with the yams and the green bean casserole and the silence-inducing political diatribes.
Kids (and kids at heart): please allow me to be your official fact-checker for all the misinformation you might have heard during this past month of marathon meals and overstuffed family weekends. I’ve made my list, and I’ve checked it twice.
Grandma: “Stop peeking in the oven! You’ll let out all the heat.”
Actually: Most of the heat in an oven is stored in–and radiates from–its walls. If you leave an oven door open for a full minute, you can let out enough hot air for the temperature to drop 100 degrees or so, but it’ll bounce back in even less time once the door is shut again, probably without the oven even having to turn back on. It might be annoying when kids peek in the oven every five minutes, but it’s not going to affect the turkey or the pumpkin pie one bit.
Aunt Jill: “Stay out of my cookie dough! You’ll get worms.”
Actually: Worms come from shellfish and pork, so Christmas cookies (and especially Hanukkah cookies) are guaranteed to be worm-free. Your aunt is probably thinking of the salmonella threat posed by the raw eggs in cookie dough. It’s true that the Scrooges at the FDA call raw cookie dough “really dangerous,” but the math doesn’t bear them out. One in every 20,000 eggs is contaminated, yes, but that means the average person will come across one every 84 years. What are the odds that your once-in-a-lifetime bad egg will be the unpasteurized one in homemade eggnog or cookie dough? Not very good. Let the kids graze, Grandma.
Grandpa: “Finish your carrots! Good for your eyes.”
Actually: It’s true that carrots are rich in Vitamin A, and if your kids never got any Vitamin A, their vision would suffer. But Vitamin A deficiency is almost unknown today in the developed world. The carrot myth vision actually got its start during World War II, when the Royal Air Force claimed that its ace pilots owed their amazing kill ratio to a carrot-rich diet. In reality, the British had invented airborne radar, but they didn’t want anyone to know that. The carrot cover story was good counterintelligence, but lousy nutritional info. Too many carrots won’t give you super-hero vision, or help you shoot down Nazis. They’ll just turn your skin orange.
Dad: “That’s enough candy! You’ll rot your teeth.”
Actually: Despite what parents and dentists always say, sugar doesn’t rot your teeth. Tooth decay is caused by the acid released by mouth microbes when they chow down on carbohydrates. Yes, that can include sugar, but tests show that the sugary detritus of candy is actually washed away fairly quickly by saliva. It’s the leftovers from starchy foods that stick around longest in your molars. Brushing after meals is always a good idea, of course, but there’s nothing particularly nefarious about sugar.
Mom: “Turkey makes you sleepy. Early bedtime, kids!”
Actually: Turkey, like many other foods, contains the amino acid tryptophan. Because tryptophan gets converted in the body into the eyelid-drooping neurotransmitter serotonin, holiday lore has turned turkey into the Nyquil of the bird kingdom. But that’s just not true. Tryptophan can be used as a sleep aid, but it only works (a) in giant doses, and (b) on an empty stomach, without any protein. So your post-meal holiday coma has nothing to do with turkey. It’s because you just ate more food in an hour than a fashion model eats in a year.
It’s fun to roast these old chestnuts on an open fire, but it’s also good for kids when we’re not constantly nagging them over dozens of harmless behaviors. When well-meaning but overprotective adults have banned simple joys like cookie dough, for crying out loud, that’s how we know we’ve gone too far.
My resolution for the new year is to let my kids be kids. Enough with the anxiety and the hovering and the endless white lies.
(Except about Santa–who, if my kids are reading this, is totally, 100 percent real.)
