How Neophobia makes your kids selfish
"How come everything I don't like is good for me and everything I do isn't?!"
— Mario, Super Mario World
Many years ago, a friend of mine came home and joined us for lunch. As a typical south Indian house, we were having white rice and daal with pickle, papad, etc., After a few minutes, I saw he was spending a lot of time sorting something on his plate. I noticed he was picking mustard seeds one by one with his finger and pushing it to the side of the plate. He collected so many seeds that the plate was crawling with rolling mustards all over. We all finished our food but he was so busy with all that activity on his plate that he was not even halfway through. I asked him what he was doing and he said he doesn't like that the taste of mustard seed. Really? a mustard seed? I didn't even know what a mustard seed tastes like. I found one on my plate and put it in my mouth and to my awe, I did get a taste - a taste so negligible that I don't even remember the taste after 2 seconds. Why would he spend so much time & effort picking them apart for something so negligible?
Parents these days have a sentence they like using when introducing their kids at dinner tables.
"My child is going through a picky phase"
Whether that remains a phase or not we don't know but this Selecting Eating Disorder (SED) is now being associated with a disease called: Neophobia.
Many children these days can only eat a select group of food items. Pasta, french fries, pancakes, grilled cheese sandwiches, pizza with selected toppings – these bland foods are so popular that some children will eat nothing else. Many children who are picky eaters graduate from this restricted diet and learn to eat all types of food. But a small group of kids grows up to be adults and the preference for the bland comfort foods of childhood never disappears. I am sure you've had some adults on your table who say: "I don't like that; I never ate that; I can't stand that, etc."
Although pickiness has not yet been officially recognized as a mental disorder, the American Psychiatric Association is considering its inclusion in the next edition of the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), the official compendium of emotional and mental disorders.
Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh and Duke University are studying the problem of extreme picking eating and understand that “People who are picky aren’t doing this to be stubborn.” they genuinely have a problem.
Adults with selective eating disorders experience food differently from other people. Instead of avoiding one or two foods, they have such a limited list of acceptable food that their eating interferes with almost every aspect of their lives. One such gentleman says since childhood he avoided visiting friends to avoid being offered food. He also attributes the failure of two marriages to his eating disorder and says that if he could snap his fingers and change, he would, but he can't.
Most people with this eating disorder are very embarrassed by their behaviour in relation to food and do everything they can to keep it hidden. In addition to the embarrassment caused by this disorder, doctors are concerned that a limited diet of foods that are low in nutrition can lead to long-term nutritional deficiencies and health problems that can include heart and bone problems. This eating disorder is not as dangerous as anorexia or bulimia but it can still cause long-term health problems.
However, I am not here to talk about health problems now, am I?
Many of these cases are extreme and not necessarily influenced by external factors. This means, that some children are driven to the disorder and some are born with it. The ones who are driven to it, may not be influenced by their parents. But we can't ignore the fact that they are influenced by their "parent's love". 💙
Love makes parents 'spoil' their kids with choices. I know the word 'spoil' is not taken in the literal sense these days. But for the sake of this article, let us take for its literal meaning.
What do you think is the thought process of the child in this matter?
Does a child conceive this as an 'option' or as 'Freedom'?
If I were a child and my parents offered me food which is unfamiliar.
Should I eat it?
Or do I have a choice?
Let me try asking for a choice. "Mummy, I don't like this food".
Now as a parent, you have two options:
1. Force the kid to eat the food which will upset him and everyone around; or
2. Make him something he will eat without making a fuss.
Now as a child whose parents opted for option no. 2, how does that impact their thinking?
Freedom of choice in food predominantly leads to freedom in a general sense.
Freedom to do what they want when they want.
This 'freedom' is a concept that has crept deep into every millennial. While freedom in a general sense is liberty from oppression, but millennial freedom is having the right to do anything, anywhere, anytime, and to anyone. The concept is so lost to them that they ignore the fact that we live in a world that needs us to co-exist. They forget that we need co-existing Relationships.
A millennial relationship is something they 'enter' when they want and 'exit' when they want and everything that happens in between is an amalgamation of consent and choice in the guise of freedom.
Freedom in millennial marriage is such that these days a husband and wife can see each other naked but they can't see each other's phones. Such deluded is the concept of 'choice and consent' which is loosely referred to as freedom.
I am sure you're wondering why we segway from food neophobia into millennial marriage. For me both of these are inter-related. A child who grows up with many choices and so-called 'freedom' eventually believes that everything in this world has to work in their favour and they will be irritated with anything that doesn't.
The 'want of freedom' will eventually grow so strong that they will not stop for a moment to think about the wants of people around them. Perennially making them self-important or in simple terms selfish.
If you're someone who says: "how is selfishness bad? ", then I am pretty sure you're someone who has given importance to "what you want" more than "Who you want that with". And that's just Neophobic to me.
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I'd like to leave you with a wonderful verse from 1 John 3:17 which says:
"But if anyone has the world's goods and sees his brother in need,
yet closes his heart against him, how does God's love abide in him?"
