Obesity-proofing our children 168 Parenting is all about instilling long-term healthy behaviors in children and the conflict around this is immense and will occur on and off for their entire childhood. Being prepared to enter into this conflict is the first responsibility of bringing a child into the world. There is no better example of this love than when it comes to instilling healthy eating habits in our children. We will come back to this issue when we discuss how love is not a feeling a little later in the chapter. The gift of indoctrination Children are our future. That is undoubtedly true, but I have my own reason for writing this chapter. Most people who come to see me are roughly middle-aged – from 35 to 50. They often lament, as I used to, that they wished they had gotten therapy when they were in their early twenties. In this way, they could have avoided a decade or two of painful stumbling around trying to make sense of life and relationships. I say,‘ I used to’ because then I saw a couple of twenty-somethings and I realized that at that age they were not really that concerned about their life not working out. Therapy was irrelevant because at twentysomething they felt they had lots of time to sort things out – a couple of decades in fact! Just like teenagers really – only not quite so rude and rebellious. And so I have come to appreciate that once a child turns 13, or thereabouts, their capacity to be influenced diminishes greatly for the next twenty or thirty years. Habits, values and beliefs established before their 13th year can become lifelong. After that point in time it becomes much more difficult( albeit not impossible) to change or develop new habits. We often think of indoctrination as bad, like brainwashing. But what if we use this force in the name of good rather than evil! The truth is that parents and others – at school or in the media – indoctrinate children with all sort of beliefs and habits in their formative years. This is why they are called‘ formative years’.