Gerald W. Aungst

My youngest son has some very spe­cific food preferences—think “Mikey” from the old Life cereal com­mer­cials. Mean­ing that most of the time, when we sit down at the din­ner table, the first words out of his mouth are, “I don’t like that.” My wife and I have slightly dif­fer­ent views on how to han­dle this. Often, she will make some­thing spe­cial for him just so that he’ll eat. That’s what moms do, espe­cially an Ital­ian one. My view more often than not is that he’s just being overly picky and he can eat what we put in front of him.

Now before you start writ­ing your com­ment chastis­ing me for being a cruel dad, most of the time when we insist he taste what we’ve made, he likes it and will eat it. And he has yet to go to bed hun­gry. So my wife and I actu­ally bal­ance each other nicely. Don’t tell her I said that, though.

My atti­tude towards my son’s eat­ing habits would change, though, if it were a mat­ter of health and nutri­tion rather than pref­er­ence. If he had a con­di­tion that required a spe­cific diet, I would go out of my way to pro­vide it, even going so far as to cook spe­cial meals for him. I would give him sup­ple­ments to replace defi­cien­cies in his body and keep the nutri­ents at opti­mum levels.

We tend to treat edu­ca­tion like nutri­tion. The reg­u­lar cur­ricu­lum is designed around the rec­om­mended daily allowance of read­ing, math, sci­ence and social stud­ies. The con­tent is nutri­tion, and we pro­vide the amounts that are needed to keep children’s brains grow­ing and learn­ing. Some stu­dents have defi­cien­cies, and we spend extra time, effort, and money to cus­tomize their diets to bring them back to opti­mal health.

But what about the gifted stu­dents? I fear that many peo­ple look at them in the same way as the child who likes to eat a lot. We’re wor­ried that if they eat too much, they’ll get fat, so we care­fully reg­u­late their diets, keep­ing them to the rec­om­mended amounts, mak­ing sure they don’t go over­board. It’s the same thing my wife and I do when our kids equate being bored with being hun­gry. Instead of giv­ing them snacks every half hour, we redi­rect them and give them some­thing else to keep them occupied.

But this model is wrong. Instead of look­ing at gifted kids as overeaters, we need to real­ize that they actu­ally have an entirely dif­fer­ent kind of metab­o­lism. They con­sume more not just out of pref­er­ence but out of neces­sity. They have a con­di­tion that requires much higher amounts of com­plex and dif­fer­ent nutri­ents just to stay healthy. But when they balk at eat­ing the same diet we’re giv­ing to the rest of the fam­ily, we tend to see them as whiny brats and respond just as I do to my youngest son: “It’s good for you. Just eat it. And if you clean your plate, then you can have dessert.”

It’s not a mat­ter of keep­ing their appetites under con­trol. It’s rec­og­niz­ing that their nutri­tional needs are com­pletely dif­fer­ent than ours. The learn­ing they crave isn’t dessert, and forc­ing them to eat the meal first doesn’t keep them healthy. With­hold­ing the chal­leng­ing con­tent, or keep­ing it care­fully con­trolled, or ignor­ing the mes­sages they give us about what they want and need isn’t actu­ally pre­vent­ing obe­sity, it’s malnutrition.