Shopping, such fun

0 Comments | Press, The; Christchurch, New Zealand, Jul 28, 2010 | by Liz BRESLIN

Supermarkets can be hell for children and parents. Liz Breslin suggests taking a different approach.

Ihave never been one of those women to stand in a supermarket checkout line, rocking my child-free trolley.

I have only rarely been one of those women who have misbehaving children kicking in the aisles, although there was the time that I got down on the floor and had a tantrum to stop a tired child from doing much the same. It worked, really well.

Let’s face it, supermarkets are a cruel, torturous trial for children. Tantalising smells invite them to poke their hands in the bread bin. Toys, chocolate and magazines at head height in boring lines scream “Touch me!”

Mum says, “Just for looking”.

What is there to like about a supermarket if you can’t actually do anything in it?

Plunket’s advice on children and shopping, as part of maintaining a secure, structured environment, is “Don’t try taking them to the supermarket when they’re tired and hungry”.

I would go a step further. Don’t take yourself to the supermarket in that state either. A coffee and a sticky bun now can avoid a lot of mayhem later, although Plunket probably doesn’t recommend the coffee for under-fives.

I have a girlfriend, who, taking that advice to its logical extremes, reasons that her children will always be tired and hungry by the end of a supermarket trip, if not at the start.

Her solution is to leave them at home. She doesn’t rock trolleys in the checkout line. She shops in heels and reads magazines while she waits. Fabulous.

But there is another way. It’s a longer, messier way. Some days it requires two sugars in your coffee to get you through it, but its aim is to get children to understand where food comes from and how.

Jamie Oliver shocked American viewers of Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution by showing that kindergarten children didn’t recognise whole vegetables
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