Obesity-proofing our children 177 In just one chapter I don’ t have the scope to cover what would easily fill a book, but allow me to distill from our work in this area a couple more key issues. Children are the world’ s best accountants One of the key insights that came out of our research and work with parents was that, if children are continuing to not do what we want them to do, in some way we must be doing or allowing something to encourage their behavior. Children are the world’ s best accountants. They evaluate their behavior in a given situation, weigh the benefits and costs and decide on balance whether the behavior has value and should be repeated. Parents need to become the world’ s best tax collectors. The tax office in any country can turn on or off any industry it chooses by giving it tax breaks or taxing it very heavily. Sometimes the tax office is a bit slow on the uptake and does not realize that it has left loopholes that make one industry more lucrative than others. So it is with parents. Parents are parents part-time as they are also lots of other things including: wives, husbands, single parents to other children and employees. Children are kids full-time. And their job description is primarily to satisfy as many primal urges as they can and eating as much yummy food as possible is somewhere around the top of the list. In evaluating which behaviors to repeat and which to throw out, most kids immediately discount being yelled at in anger as irrelevant. While a minority will quiver and shake and respond to this, most learn, over the years that anger is just another way of being talked to. Excluding outright swearing, name calling and other forms of emotional abuse, simply getting angrier at our children becomes just another form of communication. The child will notice and say to themselves,‘ That’ s interesting, Mum does not appear very happy about this’. But it does not make it into the accounting evaluation that will determine if the behavior