Erik Schraga shares about his daughter’s nutrition and what’s on the kid’s menu.
My wife and I pack our six-year-old daughter a healthy lunch every morning. Most days, it comes home untouched. She eats the free school lunch instead. And the menu is usually chicken strips, pizza, mac and cheese and a hamburger. The kind of food that has its own category in our culture. We call it “kid food.” I am a physician. I know exactly what that food does to a developing body.
And I still watched it happen for months before I said to myself: how did we all agree to this? Walk into almost any restaurant and the children’s menu is a version of the same five items. We have decided, as a society, that children get a separate, lesser category of food. And we have given it a name that makes it sound normal. “Kid food.” I think about what we are teaching in those moments. Not just about nutrition, but about expectations.
We are telling children that this is what eating looks like for them, and that at some point, when they are older, they will graduate to something better. But here is what we are not telling them: childhood is when bones are built. When muscle develops. When the brain grows faster than it ever will again. This is the least appropriate time in a human life to treat food as an afterthought.
I have caught myself finishing the chicken strips my kids left behind, just to avoid wasting them. I felt awful afterward. Not because of the food itself, but because I realized I would never have chosen it for myself. I love my children more than I love myself. And they should be fed like it. The occasional pizza or burger is fine. That is what makes it a treat. The problem is when it becomes the assumption. The default. The standard. Kid food is not a category. It is a missed opportunity. With a Perspective, I’m Erik Schraga.
Dr. Erik Schraga is a concierge physician in Portola Valley who focuses on fitness and longevity. He lives in Los Gatos with his wife and 6-year-old daughter.