Ideologically I agree about the absurdity of school-mandated spy- and crapware. However, my fierce hatred of advertisements and trackers is merely a personality quirk. A quirk that, although mainstream on this forum, is shared only by a tiny percentage of the population. Should a parent force their eccentricities on a child? Preferably not. Children, once they reach a certain age, are their own people with their own preferences and aspirations. For many people (that includes adults) staying in touch with others through facebook or other social media is what they desire more than anything else. Isolating people like that from their friends and peers is cruel.
I don't find it to be a personality quirk any more than I find healthy eating and regular exercise to be a personality quirk. The rest of the population can eat Cinnamon Toast Crunch and drink Coke if that's what they want, but it's not going to be in our house. Part of my job is to guide my kids toward making wise choices and avoiding obviously poor ones, even if 80% of the population does it. I don't think that requires social isolation; I think that requires placing them in situations where the other 20% are wildly over-represented as peers.
I hope you'll take the time to teach your children to think independently, and when you do you'll discover that as they grow a bit older they'll have different values and draw different conclusions on issues you care about. I think it's fine to be a contrarian and opinionated parent but if you demand that your children share all (or even the majority) of your contrarian beliefs you're doing them a great disservice and you set them up for failure down the line.
The entire point of not accepting surveillance and advertising is to help them develop to be independent, have a strong internal sense of self-worth, and derive happiness from within. The surveillance/ad industry has exactly the opposite goal: make them feel judged at all times, base their self-worth on the perceived opinion of others (including people they've never even met), and have that perceived opinion be that if they buy X they will reacquire their stolen happiness.
The beautiful thing about being a contrarian is you can only win: either they agree with you, so you must've gotten through to them, or they don't, so you must've gotten through to them.
It is funny, because over focus on healthy eating and exercise can be a quirk ... or grow entirely into full on eating disorder. And that one is rather massive fck up.
> The rest of the population can eat Cinnamon Toast Crunch and drink Coke if that's what they want, but it's not going to be in our house.
And then the nutritionist and psychologist will beat into you that there is no such thing as junk food, it is just a food, and drinking coke wont harm you or your kid.
Such a nutritionist or psychologist would be an incompetent fool, of course. Sugary beverages are horrible for you, and are associated with a variety of poor health outcomes (obviously T2D and tooth decay, but also e.g. heart disease and liver disease). If a nutritionist can't identify that a can of literal sugar water is a worse calorie source than e.g. a potato in pretty much all scenarios (perhaps except during the act of running an ultra-marathon), then I can't imagine what use consulting them could possibly have.
You don't have to give a kid an eating disorder to explain that candy for breakfast isn't acceptable, and we don't drink dissolved sugar (except perhaps as an extremely rare treat, like cake). Just set an example of a normal life where we don't do those things. Let them see the results speak for themselves as they observe society, and let them eventually ponder if everyone is wrong about something so obvious, how good could society (including, apparently, credentialed 'experts') possibly be at other judgements it makes?
No, that is standard today. With rising eating disorders, the fear based nutrition advice that simply does not even say the truth is avoided.
A can of coke won't harm you in the slightest.
Especially for teenagers, they would had to eat super massive amount of potatoes, so actually getting calories only from that would be spectacularly bad idea.
Currently nutritionists work really hard to undo damage the sort of things you are saying are causing.
So the standard today is incompetence. An excellent lesson to learn early.
A can of Coke will not harm you in any meaningful way, but people do not have a can of Coke. They have 1+ cans of Coke every day. That absolutely will harm you.
I don't know how you took me to suggest someone eat only potatoes. I said a potato (anything, really) is a better source of calories than a Coke for pretty much all purposes. Pretty much no person anywhere needs an extra 39 g sugar with no nutrients at all in their diet.
Currently, 74% of the US is overweight or obese by BMI, which is likely an under-estimate of excess bodyfat: another 10% or so may have Normal Weight Obesity (i.e. skinnyfat), which is an understudied but increasingly recognized problem. Even without the issue of excess bodyfat, regularly creating large blood sugar spikes like that is not good for you. If nutritionists are working really hard to combat the idea that drinking literal sugar water is inappropriate for anyone to be doing with any regularity, then they are dropping the ball. In fact, you can find plenty of resources for the general public from the CDC about the deleterious effects of sugary beverages[0], and encouragement to reduce consumption of added sugars[1], specifically sugary beverages[2], the leading source of excess sugar in American diets.
Saying that candy is not food is not fear based nutrition. It is saying that candy is not food. We're not "afraid" of sugar or carbs; we just know "Skittles" aren't a food group, and have no purpose in any meal plan. Part of teaching kids how to be healthy is teaching them that we eat a variety of foods which each contribute different necessary nutrients with an appropriate calorie budget for our activity levels so that they understand how to one day develop their own plans. In that context, it ought to be obvious why our diet doesn't include pure sugar.
The competent thing to do is to teach people not to have emotional attachments to food. "This is not good for me (in fact injures me) and serves me no purpose, so I will not eat/drink it, and I will not buy it." That's it. The disorder is getting emotional about it and thinking it's somehow "damaging" to exclude junk food from one's diet.
