Choosing the food for your toddler's party can be problematic, at best, writes Edel Morgan
HOSTING A PARTY for toddlers and young children can be a minefield. Finding an entertainer who isn't booked up until well into 2009 is the easy part - the real challenge is in organising the food.
Serve anything that's not home-made, organic or unprocessed and you risk raised eyebrows from other parents or, worse, scenes of parents leaping in horror to shield their offspring from the offending foodstuffs.
If you haven't baked yourself, you'd better know the ingredients; the chances are there will be at least one child attending with an egg, wheat or dairy intolerance (or all three) or a more serious allergy.
The parents interviewed for this article declined to be named for fear of offending other parents or having their children excluded from the toddler party circuit.
One mother of three has noticed a major change since her eldest daughters, now in their late teens, were attending parties in the early to mid-1990s.Back then, she remembers, children would tuck into ice-cream, cake and chocolate at parties with relative abandon and with few parents present. Now back on the scene with her three-year-old son, she says children arrive at parties with large notices stuck to their clothes stating their food intolerances or allergies. "At one party a little boy with a nut allergy turned up with his own box of food."
Nutritional therapist Anna Collins says food intolerances and allergies are definitely on the rise. Theories on why this is happening abound and Collins says that some research suggests it can be caused by parents introducing certain allergenic foods too early.
A food allergy is an immune system reaction to a particular food which is usually instantaneous and, in severe cases, can be life threatening. Food intolerances are more common and usually less serious in the short term and can be caused when a child's immature gut is unable to digest certain foods which go directly into the bloodstream.
Symptoms, which can include nausea and headaches, may not manifest for up to 48 hours. She says wheat and dairy intolerances are the most widespread and it's no coincidence they are the two most common foods in the Irish diet.
"Wheat contains gluten and cow's milk contains casein, which are both difficult to digest."
Another mother who hosted a creche party for her three-year-old daughter's birthday says that, in the week leading up to the party, she spent her lunchbreaks scouring the supermarket for treats with no added sugar, E numbers or artificial food colourings.
"I even bought the ingredients to make my own low-sugar wholewheat fairy cakes but ran out of time. I ended up doing a last-minute dash to the supermarket to buy packaged fairy cakes and iced them myself and in my rush didn't check the ingredients .
"After the party, I got a text from a mother asking if my 'home-made' fairy cakes contained egg because her child, who had an egg allergy, had eaten one and hadn't been sick and she was trying to ascertain if he had outgrown the allergy. I felt like such an irresponsible parent admitting that not only had I bought them, worse, I hadn't checked the packaging and wasn't sure if they contained egg. After trawling through the bin, I found the packaging and found that not only was there egg in them, they had several E numbers."
She says while she tried to limit the junk food at the party, she got some friendly advice from one of the parents who said: "You'd be surprised how well fruit goes down at a party".
While there's no denying good nutrition is important, can there sometimes be an element of competitive nutrition among parents who use food as a form of parental one-upmanship? And can parents exert too much dietary control over their children? Or with obesity levels soaring and many children sent into orbit by sugary foods, are parents right to take the moral high ground and insist their little ones are ushered towards the carrot sticks at all times?
Anna Collins believes that if children have a healthy diet 90 per cent of the time "it's okay to have the odd breakout if parents can put up with the fall-out of the effects of hyperactivity from eating sugary foods".
She believes banning foods outright can have the psychological effect of leaving a child feeling deprived because ultimately "they want to do what their peers are doing".
She says a clever way of combating the behavioural effects of sugary foods is to also provide plenty of protein at a party, like vegetarian sausages, cubes of cheese, mini poppadoms, and dips like guacamole and hummus.
"It's a great idea to make sure kids have a good lunch before you go to a party to limit the bad effects of less good foods."
Small children are often happy to eat the slightly healthier option like strawberries dipped in chocolate "which looks nice but is not as unhealthy as chocolate rice crispie cakes".
It is difficult for even the most vigilant parent to keep track of labelling where there is a "huge level of confusion".
A standard yoghurt can contain four spoons of sugar and parents trying to limit a child's sugar intake "might choose diet yoghurt which can contain aspartame which is a neuro-toxin linked to cancer and obesity. A food might say 'low fat' on the packaging but might have artificial flavouring, more sugar or
aspartame."
She recommends a book called The Art of Hiding Vegetables by Karen Bali and Sally Child, published by White Ladder Press, which has a section on easy to prepare party food with clever tips like mixing apple or orange juice with sparkling mineral water as an alternative to soft drinks, adding tinned fruit in natural juice to jelly, or having chocolate-dipped fruit.
It also has tips for catering for children who can't eat wheat or dairy.
Collins believes that parents shouldn't beat themselves up too much if they feel they've let the side down by not providing a party table full of fresh and innovative, home-cooked, organic food.
"It's a difficult job to be a parent and it's better not to dwell on what's happened in the past but to concentrate on what you are going to do in the future and tell yourself, 'well, I really did my best'. Who was it that said you can't please all of the people all of the time?"
Anna Collins website is www.improveyourhealth.ie
She can be contacted on 01-473 7992