Lately I've been reading a lot about unschooling/ natural parenting. What I've found is that the more I read, the more I have to unsubscribe from homeschooling list/ discussion/ message forum I've been reading, because I find it so toxic to deal with so many people's overwhelming control issues. One of the main ways in which people perpetuate control issues is through their controlling their kids' food. Whether it be through a special diet or through vegetarianism or limiting sweets or SOMETHING. I guess since it's such a basic need, it's a basic starting point for control. For me this has been very evident in online and RL circles of parents with special needs kids. It seems like everyone who homeschools a kid with autism is obsessed with controlling the autism (or more accurately, the autistic child) via controlling their kids' food. When my son was very small, I tried the Gluten Free, Casein Free diet prescribed to many parents of autistic kids. I saw my son suffering, and connected it to his being different from other kids; I didn't blame it on the fact that *I* was the one struggling because his personality and needs don't fall in line with cliche child development expectations but because he was autistic and hyper and I was convinced THAT NEEDED FIXING and this diet claimed to help me do that. I tried the GFCF for 9 months. It was sincerely all 31 flavors of hell. I am a single parent who works from home and though Dad is supportive and contributes, we are on a very tight budget and I have limited amounts of time. GFCF cooking and eating was expensive and time consuming. AND DISGUSTING. All the GFCF substitutes for the real things are gross, y'all. Fake bread and pasta and cookies - all gross. Real Oreos are good, GFCF "oreos" are nasty (my son and I have a joke now - any food whose name includes quotes is probably inedible). Some things are edible, but edible isn't the same as enjoyable. And I'm not going to pay $7 for a marginally edible loaf of bread that takes me 3 hours to make, when $1.59 buys me a really good normal loaf from Publix. I hated the diet the whole time we adhered to it. I felt like a horrible person, snatching cookies out of my kid's hands at birthday parties, naysaying all his food preferences, nagging him to drink soymilk (which neither of us, we can now admit, really likes) instead of cow's milk, etc etc. etc. It was socially limiting and restrictive to my child, so I couldn't see how that helped with my son's social struggles. And the more you find out about this way of eating, the longer the list of foods you cannot eat gets. Your food world gets narrower and narrower. And worst of all, when I really started questioning and reading the scant research there is out there, I discovered there is almost NO SCIENTIFIC PROOF that it helps make autistic kids happier or more well-functioning (whatever that even means) at all. And yet there are autism treatment centers who won't even see you for a consultation if you are unwilling to absolutely control everything your kid eats. I am not saying there is no such thing as a gluten intolerance or allergy to artificial ingredients or whatever. Obviously there are. There are tests for that. I now tell parents, if you think your kid is celiac, or allergic to anything else, this is a serious thing that is permanently and radically life-altering. Get him tested and make sure there are solid medical reasons for controlling his food to that degree. Don't start eliminating all your kids' preferred food just because you hope, based on frantic Internet anecdotes, that it'll make your 5yo less hyper. (God forbid a 5yo should be hyper.) That is a recipe for sure-fire misery all around and probably won't do anything but perpetuate misery.
I now think it's easier to blame a slice of bread for your unhappy but otherwise perfectly normal-for-him 5yo than it is to blame your own parenting. I'm not saying that to be unkind to other parents; I'm saying that out of my own experiences. It was easier for me to blame wheat and milk for the unhappiness in our home than it was for me to blame my attempts at control and my lack of understanding toward my son.
I read so much about autism and diets now and parents' massive control issues and pain seem so transparent, it hurts me to read it. "You've heard apples cause problems? My son loves apples. He eats apples every day. Maybe it's making him more autistic. What about apples is bad? Maybe I should throw out all his apples." And I just hurt for that poor little child who already takes so little joy in eating, and now he won't get his apples either!
In fact, a big part of the GFCF autism cult is the idea that if a child strongly prefers a food, it is because they're "addicted" to it and causes serotonin levels to spike "like an opiate" (again, adherents will freely concede there is no scientific basis for this at all, it is almost entirely anecdotal) and that preferred food should automatically be SUSPECT and possibly eliminated in a radical way. It seems so obvious now to me where this all stems from. I feel like thousands of autistic kids must be living lives of quiet food-related desperation because of this, because they are told that what they love to eat makes them SICK. And sadly, SICK mostly means "more authentically themselves".
About 9 months into the GFCF diet, I gave up and announced we we would start eating whatever we wanted. My kid is now 11 and eats whatever he wants, whenever he wants it. I am a single mom on a limited budget and can't afford EVERYTHING, so each week we make a list of stuff we feel like eating, way more than we could eat that week. We include stuff I like and stuff he likes - they don't always overlap, but neither of us censor ourselves. Then we check on the local grocery ads and, being fiscally responsible sorts, we try to buy food for the week based on what's on sale from our list.
We then have a list of stuff we can make from what we bought posted on our fridge. It's a list of about 25 different meal ideas. They are suggestions. Every mealtime, he checks out the list and picks out what he wants and I make it. Sometimes we have breakfast for dinner or vice versa. Sometimes I make new things as "sides;" sometimes he tries them and sometimes he doesn't. He's incredibly healthy; he hasn't been sick in forever and he's shooting up like a weed, so I don't worry.
Annnnd. Guess what. He's still "hyper" and high-energy (when did we decide this was an illness?). He's also still autistic. But taking ice cream and chocolate milk away isn't going to change that for him. So if he wants ice cream, he eats ice cream. And so do I! It is interesting to me that despite his school-psychologist diagnosis of "worst case scenario ADHD" my son has a great capacity for attention - to things in which he is interested. I just no longer classify his interests as dysfunctional and no longer try to coercively change them with food.
Of course I cannot say this on any autism-homeschool list without being flayed alive. When I expressed doubts about the GFCF racket (it is a racket, there are whole companies devoted to marketing vitamins, nasty bread substitutes, etc. to adherents of the diet) on these lists, I was told I was a bad parent who didn't try hard enough and who sought after my own convenience over the "needs" of my child. I have even been called abusive because people believe giving wheat to a kid with autism is the same as giving sugar by the spoonfuls to a child with diabetes. But the reality is that my child didn't "need" to have cookies snatched out of his hand at birthday parties to be happy.
My child just needs to be loved and encouraged exactly as he is.