Obesity-proofing our children 183 member. This strategy added such vegetables as squash and bok choy to our meals. Now, years later, both our children not only eat their vegetables and salads without complaint but will order them when they are eating out or complain when their meal does not come with them. It is okay if there are a few foods children genuinely dislike. They should not be forced to eat them. It is when the foods on this list threaten to equal or exceed the foods on the‘ okay to eat’ list that we have a problem. It is not often that I say‘ never’, but please never get in the habit of making a special meal for your child. Only very occasionally, if your child is sick for example, should this occur. Children must learn to eat a wide variety of foods. The most successful way to do this is to model this to your children by constantly introducing new foods and eating them yourselves. If nothing else, this increases the chance of finding healthy foods they will eat readily. A word of warning – remember, after teenagehood hits, your power of influence decreases dramatically. It’ s not quite all over, but essentially the younger you start, the easier the battle. Special time I will finish this chapter by talking a little about the most powerful force that we can apply in getting our children to comply with our wishes. It is doubly important because when we looked at success stress and the success – self-worth mismatch in Chapter 13, on Self-sabotage, we saw how people with low self-esteem will often sabotage their success because they do not feel worthy of it. Special Time is also the most powerful way to improve our child’ s sense of self-worth. I spoke earlier about how children may see you getting angry with them as a positive, in that negative attention can be experienced by children as better than no attention. When parents are busy or preoccupied with issues in their own life, children will seek attention. First they try for positive attention and when this fails they move onto