Toddlers who dislike spicy food 'racist' The National Children's Bureau, which receives £12 million a year, mainly from Government funded organisations, has issued guidance to play leaders and nursery teachers advising them to be alert for racist incidents among youngsters in their care.
This could include a child of as young as three who says "yuk" in response to being served unfamiliar foreign food.
The guidance by the NCB is designed to draw attention to potentially-racist attitudes in youngsters from a young age.
Are they nuts? When my children were two they said "yuck" at anything that remotely resembled a sauce. No spaghetti sauce, no stew, no marinated chicken, and certainly nothing where everything was mixed together. Did that make them racist?
Luckily, they ate vegetables galore, so I didn't get the "yuck" at broccoli that many parents do. But "yuck" is a child's first response to things they don't know well. That isn't a racist sentiment; that's human nature. As adults, we try to coax our kids to eat more and more foods and try more and more things because it's healthy, and it's also fun! I love Indian food, but it took my children until they were 10 to try it. But it's a fun part of life.
Obviously the bureaucrats in this story have far too much time on their hands and no sense of perspective. But this leads me to two major conclusions:
1. They likely do not have children themselves. Increasingly you can divide our culture into two groups: those with kids, and those without. Now this is a generalization, because I know people without kids who are perfectly sane and in fact wise. Increasingly, though, people have chosen career over family, and so career has taken such an importance that it can lead to things like this bureaucratic directive.
Think about it: if you do not have children, you likely live for your job, unless you're well grounded in other areas. I'm not talking about infertile people here; that's a whole other class, because culturally they're quite similar. I'm talking about those who choose not to have children.
I know the birth rate is plummeting in most countries except the United States, but what people don't realize is that it's not that most people are only having 1 or 2 children now, but that more and more women aren't having any. The average family size OF PEOPLE WHO HAVE CHILDREN is actually increasing. They say that 3 is the new 2. It used to be the norm to have two children; now people don't tend to stop until 3. But if more and more people aren't having children at all, that puts the birth rate way down. But it also brings a major cultural divide between the childless by choice and those whose lives revolve around multiple soccer games and doctor appointments and figuring out how to save money on back to school clothes.
Some people, of course, want kids, but don't figure this out until they're 38 because they've been investing in their career. That's part of the problem. Without kids, career becomes too important, and you can develop a sense of self-importance because you don't have anything to give you a sense of perspective. And so you start viewing your job, rather than your personal life, as the way that you can change the world. And so you get ridiculous directives like this, likely written by someone who has never had to feed a toddler.
2. But there's something else going on here that I find strange. It is assumed that if people express a preference for the familiar, this is somehow a bad thing. Of course, note that in this case only white children can be racist for disparaging "foreign food". If an Indian British child stuck his nose up at Yorkshire pudding, would he be considered racist? It's implicit in this that only the native English can be racist.
However, aren't we all programmed to like the familiar? Isn't that how we learn about the world? A child expresses a preference for his or her parents above everyone else, and cries if he or she is separated from them. They can only sleep with their blankie or their teddy. They need a certain song to soothe them. They don't react well to vacations, because they're away from home.
Children need the familiar. We all do. Even adults need the familiar. Why else would we go to a McDonald's when we're in Cairo, even though we rarely frequent it at home? It's because it reminds us of home when we're homesick. And is that really so bad?
Preferring the familiar does not mean that we disparage the unfamiliar, or that we are evil. It means that we are human. These bureaucrats are trying to remake humans in their own image, but it can't be done. That job is already taken by Someone far better at it. I hope they figure that out before they mess things up even more.
About Me: I'm a Christian author of a bunch of books, and a frequent speaker to women's groups and marriage conferences. Best of all, I love homeschooling my daughters, Rebecca and Katie. And I love to knit. Preferably simultaneously.
Stumble It!
Exactly right, Sheila, particularly the point about white children being racist by default since they belong to the "oppressive" majority.
The sun is setting on free Britain, and it's not the 7/7 islamist types who are to blame, it's the decadent modern-liberal PC idealists in government.