Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Inconvenience

I try to keep up my continuing education for this mom job and what I keep learning is that everything that makes life a little easier combines to make my kids prone to obesity, ADHD, and cancer in the future.

Childcare makes kids more aggressive and impulsive later in life. Oh well.
I have to console myself with the fact that I think our Montessori program is pretty good about taking care of the kids and teaching them how to get along. When asked, Aldo recently told me that his teachers weren't nice because when you hit someone they get angry at you. That's a sign of quality right there.

And television viewing--it enables me to take a shower or get the dinner cooked and dishes washed, but at what cost? Childhood obesity, an inability to pay attention to things and rampant materialism. My kids don't watch that much television, but probably just enough to put them in the danger category. Are we really expected to pay full attention to them every minute that they're home? Who does that?

Family dinners are supposed to help heal the damage done by the rest of the day, but now making dinner is getting harder because...

Basically all canned foods contain BPA
which mimic estrogens contributing to breast and endometrial cancer and early puberty in girls and low sperm and prostate cancer in boys. I just restocked the pantry with cut green beans (which the boys LOVE,) and kidney beans which I'm going to use today in chili with the canned tomatoes. I don't know how to replace these. Good thing red wine is still supposed to be good for me.

And then lunch! Just this week, there's the news that eating red meat doesn't cause heart disease but serving deli meats and processed meats does. We love turkey bacon and turkey sandwiches. I've always felt a little relieved that we don't do the red meats, but now I don't know what to put in lunch boxes if I can't stock turkey slices. Sure, sometimes I make quesadillas or put in dumplings, but there are a lot of school days and only so much on the leftover menu.

Even being online while talking to your children teaches them that it's okay to text while having conversations and not pay full attention to people around us. And I'm doing that right now.

2 comments:

Helen said...

Argh. Nothing is safe now. But the least we can do is try and pour some more red wine.

PuddleThumper said...

I saw that about bpa in canned goods. Oh well.

Do any of these studies talk about the role of stress in our lives? I'd like to read about that.