The refrain has echoed down the corridors from childhood, like the clink of spoon on cereal bowl. Perhaps it’s come, unbidden, from your own mouth, as you hustle to muster the troops for the day.
Blah blah … eat your breakfast. Blah blah … most important meal of the day.
But when it comes to eating habits – as with all habits – what parents do is a more powerful influence than what they say. And many parents simply don’t practice what they preach about smart eating.
“I often find myself in the position of teaching the parents as well as the children,” said Karen Ingoldsby, a registered dietitian at St. Clare’s Hospital in Schenectady, N.Y.
With American meals, dinner often gets top billing. Lunch is B-level – with occasional breakout roles. Breakfast is off-Main Street community theater, with possible last-minute cancellations. In the blur of the school day, morning breakfast can get bumped to the bottom of the list, said Deborah Dzingle, mother of four, ages 12 to 19.
“We eat dinner together, but breakfast just doesn’t seem to be the American meal anymore,” Dzingle said. “I try to instill in (my kids) that they should eat breakfast, but I don’t necessarily eat breakfast. As they grow older, it’s harder to impress on them that it’s important.”
The burden to model good eating habits is especially heavy on mothers, who are still preparing the bulk of their children’s meals. Just 24 percent of moms surveyed for the second Annual Report Card on Breakfast Habits earlier this year said they thought they were good role models for their children when it came to eating habits.
Studies also have shown that Mom’s dieting influences the way daughters feel about food, and how they view their developing bodies. If Mom is dieting – and skipping breakfast – “eventually that child is going to catch on to what Mom’s doing,” said Ingoldsby.
In Peg Cologgi’s Clifton Park, N.Y., home, the school bus comes at 6:45 a.m. Breakfast follows at some murky point later in the morning, for both Cologgi and her kids.
“What they’ve gotten in the habit of doing is getting on the bus and eating during their free period later,” said Cologgi, mother of two teenage daughters and an 11-year-old son (who does make a habit of breakfast). “That’s probably a habit they picked up from me. I tend to plow into my day and a couple hours into it I tend to pick up something.”
That riff about breakfast being crucial isn’t just a line, either. Studies have consistently shown that children who skip breakfast perform poorly in school, and that skipping the first meal of the day can lead to excess snacking later on, and ultimately obesity.
“How productive is anyone when they have a pit in their stomach and their head is spinning around? And, when we’re hungry, we grab anything we can get our hands on, and usually that’s something that’s higher in calories and more fatty,” said Dean Limeri, the clinical director of primary care at Ellis Hospital in Schenectady.
“Some of the problems that we have today don’t involve really complicated medicines, but real basics. You give people three square meals a day, they do better, physically and mentally. You don’t have to be a brain surgeon to figure that out,” Limeri said.
