Um. Look I don’t want to be an alarmist or anything. But. Um.
See, I’ve got kids? And, see…they’re kind of…energetic enough? I mean really, truly. Spend five seconds in my house and you will see: they are doing just fine bouncing off the walls of their own accord. So, I’ll thank the world for not encouraging them to bounce off the ceiling, as well.
Oh, but I can‘t thank the world, because apparently the world is instead choosing to fill them with caffeine when I’m not around.
As this great article from Metroactive explains, “these days, constraints on caffeine consumption for kids and young teens are nonexistent. Kids are having caffeine early and often.” It’s not just in their drinks, apparently. Candy bars? Increasingly filled with the stuff.
Now, the question that kept going through my mind as I read this was “have these people ever been around kids?”
But apparently they have; the Metroactive article notes that it’s not just nasty food marketers that are jacking our kids up. Apparently competitive-minded parents are happily showing up at sports events with high-caffiene drinks or packages of uber-charged candy and goo to help their kids have an edge on the field.
Thanks to folks like that, turbo-charged goodies are becoming big business.
Personally, I’m wondering where our sanity has gone. But I don’t have time to contemplate it, as my kids are now scaling the side of our house. Excuse me while I go try to catch them.
Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Ali Benjamin
I'm a mama. A sustainable food activist. A former Peace Corps volunteer. Even a once-upon-a-time member of Corporate America. More recently, I taught myself to cook, so I could do something with all of those gorgeous greens I find at the farmer's market. When I'm not here, you'll find me hanging around the Cleaner Plate Club (http://cleanerplateclub.wordpress.com).
3 Responses to Caffeine for Kids…Say What?
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This quite scary – why would a parent knowingly give their kids that stuff to try and give them an edge at sports? I think we should go back to the natural way – slices of oranges or banana at breaks or half time.
Yeah, it’s wild…I’ve written a ton about it on Shaping Youth, and it makes me wonder if the ‘JumpSkyHigh’ trampoline people have stock in this deal…;-) (My daughter loves that place, where the kids LITERALLY bounce off the walls) —Kinda scary to think of what they’d do with caffeine in their systems on top of it all. ugh.
I always wondered about that, and about feeding sedatives to old people. Seems kind of reversed, huh?