Immoral parenting.

Interesting subject, no?

Now that there is so much parenting advice out there, if you don't do all 50 million things, then you're basically screwed.

Thankfully (for both my and any as yet unconceived children of mine), I am not a parent. I'm a mommy to my kitty, but that doesn't involve nighttime feedings, diaper changes, or pregnancy, so it's not quite the same.

Given the subject of my blog, I'm most concerned about how parents are judged on how they feed their children. I went to McDonald's, ordered a Happy Meal (Chicken Nuggets every time), drank juice at will, ate cookies regularly, had some sort of sweet almost every day, etc, etc. Today, this would make my mom a bad parent.

"Shame on you! You don't make your children exercise! You let them eat fast food! You let them drink juice! And pop!*"

Yet I never turned into an unhealthy person because of it. My health only seriously declined when I did the opposite of those things. As for my brother, well, let's just not go there. But his problems weren't related to what my mom fed us, either.

There was a commercial on for one of those cash advance companies and their ploy this time was, "You want to see super plays at Little League, not supersized fries."

I have nothing against Little League. I also have nothing against fries. They're trying to make a mom or dad feel guilty that they feed their children fries so they pay this huuuuuuuuuuuge fee to have time to get a "nutritious" meal and make it to a baseball game. In the long run, a fry is a fry. They're not immoral, nor are the people who eat them. I love fries, especially if you toss them in that powdered ranch dressing mix. I'm a fairly moral person. I don't cheat or steal. I always wear a seat belt. I at least try to be courteous. I meet deadlines. These were not things I learned from abstaining from fries for almost 7 years.

Not feeding your children- that's immoral. Or only feeding your children celery sticks. The line between immoral and harmful is vague. However, if you happen to have DNA that puts your children outside of the charts, you're hurting your child, and if you don't put them on a strict diet and exercise plan, you're destroying their health for the future.

People say the US has all of this horrible health. Yet infant mortality is low, we have a long life expectancy, deaths from infectious diseases are on the decline. Most people who die of heart disease have low cholesterol, and weight really isn't correlated either. Countries in Africa where food supplies are low and/or unstable, that's where you see problems. Having too little food is always always worse than having too much. So many products ::cough cough Alli cough cough:: are targeted at the 'overweight,' who actually have the lowest death rates. And if you're the parent of an 'overweight' child, you must have done something wrong.

The old saying is that "You are what you eat." So if carrot sticks are held up as this sort of Gold Standard of foods (or broccoli, or blueberries, or whatever) on both a nutritional and moral level, if you don't eat tons and tons of them, you're not only unhealthy, but you're a bad person. I don't vet this. Hitler was a vegetarian.

So let's have separation of church and state, body and business, and food and morality.

POST-NOTE: You're telling me Dr. Sanjay Gupta of CNN is a freakin' brain surgeon! Ha! Check out this chilling California ad campaign. It makes me sick!

*Where pop=soda. It's a Michigan thing. I ordered pop when I was in Atlanta and they gave me fries. I'm still scratching my head at that one.