If parenting was hard, people wouldn’t do it.

There. All parents duly stopped in their tracks.

You need to be. You absolutely need to know the lies, damn lies and statistics that are impacting the health of your newly minted kids.

That parenthood is far from easy is a given. Naturally, (and unnaturally) people are doing it. The reasons for deciding to bring a child into the world are as varied as the relationships that fill the planet.

Until just two generations ago, parents were at least a decade younger. They had fewer resources and being a single child wasn’t as common as having two, three, or even six siblings. In the ’60s and ’70s families of twelve kids still existed. It wasn’t unusual for them to live in a 3-bedroom home with two parents and one bathroom. Dad worked and mum stayed home raising chickens, veges, the Hills Hoist and her voice.

If ever there was an environment to teach a kid co-operation, resilience, patience, self-reliance and ambition, that was it.

For a long time parenthood was usefully neglectful. Twelve-year-olds babysat, any kid able to open a fridge fetched beer for the adults, and at some point during kindergarten you were getting yourself to school.

Becoming a parent in your 30s or 40s brings with life experience and the mental catalogue of accidents and death, the probability that taking undue risks with your singular or dual progeny is very, very low.

There are undeniable advantages to that; but the downside is that there is every motivation to hover. It’s an ethos that permeates and is reinforced as these children grow up that they are incapable and need to forever seek the protection of somewhere safe.

Prepackaged, ultra-processed foods (UPFs) for babies and toddlers elbowed their way to create a market that wasn’t really there until it told us we needed it, and it’s making an ever-expanding, nutritionally deficient, mushy forever home for itself. It’s a concern for dentists, nutritionists and speech therapists alike.

Throughout the history of humankind coming into being has never been guaranteed, let alone safe. There is no impenetrable protection for your children because it simply doesn’t exist. It has to be said that no matter what, the very nature of being a parent presupposes that you’re a risk to your children.

If that sounds harsh, consider the crapshoot of combining your genetics with those of someone else. It’s risky business from the get-go. Being precious about it doesn’t change the fact that even doing your very best, you’re going to somehow damage your kids. The important part is how they deal with that.

You know that just by your own upbringing. Being a parent is perilous.

There’s a general map, but mostly it’s unchartered territory involving the particulars of people, power, personalities, providing and problems. You can hone in on safety, overprotect them and hurt them by having them fearful and ill-equipped. Or you can focus on competence and courage because inevitably, when they’re hurt in the world it’s safety or strength they’ll seek.

Only one of those choices enables them to stand on their own two feet and take on challenges. Confidence and collected experience builds the belief that whatever happens, they’ll learn from it. Life-threatening situations aside, there’s equal value in knowing how to do something, and how not to do it.

Maybe it’s not perfect, but it’s a useful frame of reference. A scaffold for ongoing personal development that makes shaping the quality of their own life an adventure, rather than an impossibility.

Parenting’s hard, life’s hard and all of it is much, much harder if you’ve been dealing with decayed teeth and delayed speech since before you can remember. And all because your mum and dad thought they were doing the right thing.

Research reveals that more than 70% of parents have no idea how detrimental a typical part of baby food pouches – spouts – are to their baby’s teeth, enamel formation and speech development. Many are also unaware of the critical importance of soft chunks in food for babies from around seven months. This chewing is absolutely necessary for tongue and jaw muscle use in the proper progression of sounds and speech.

Processed snacks and pouches for babies and toddlers are unseemly offshoots of the ultra-processed food industry, latching onto the phase of development where infants and preschoolers can be picky eaters.

Essentially, it’s a normal stage of asserting a degree of independence or just needing a bit of time to try something unfamiliar to them.

A recent and stupefying facet to this, is the now significant percentage of preschoolers refusing foods with texture, and foods that require an amount of chewing effort and time.

Some relates to the social dislocation, masks, food shortages and parent anxiety that Covid created. Long gone too, are the days of older siblings as menu models and everyone eating the same food, even if it was cut into small pieces or puréed.

Whatever the complex reason, the burden of new parenting has paved the way for yet another billion-dollar industry. There are no surprises that it’s a business borne of our addiction to convenience, that it twists the truth into palatable shapes, and that its raison de jour is exclusively to maximise profits.

What’s mind-numbingly unnerving is the complete disregard manufacturers have for the long-term harm it causes at such a crucial age. And it’s achieved purely by targeting a market that has nothing but good intention, and is too dog-tired and distracted to sort truth from tripe.

It’s also important to note that organic baby foods aren’t necessarily better either, due in no small part to the fact that many of them contain brown rice. Rice plants naturally contain arsenic, with more in brown than white. It’s this reason that for the last few years, both the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recommend limiting rice intake for babies.

If this isn’t eye-widening news, Harvard Health Publishing reported in 2021 that the US House Committee on Oversight and Reform found that commercial baby foods are tainted with dangerous levels of lead, cadmium, arsenic, and mercury. There are only four manufacturers: Nurture, Beech-Nut, Hain, and Gerber.

How this is able to continue is anyone’s guess, and nobody would have guessed the guesswork clearly going on in these companies.

UPFs are distinct from processed foods, which encompass anything canned, cooked or frozen and made with ingredients commonly found in a domestic kitchen. Ultra-processed foods are linked to poor environmental outcomes, high levels of plastic waste and pollution, the monocultural production of commodity crops, and the numerous impacts on biodiversity related to that.

Worse still, is the marketing these manufacturers use in feeding babies and preschoolers highly processed powders, pouches and crunchy shapes. ‘Melty’ snacks, designed for those with chewing difficulties to melt in the mouth allay fears of choking. With kids so frequently fed in the backseat of the car, that in itself is not necessarily a bad thing.

What is, is the perception it gives that manufacturers really care about your little ones.

They don’t. They’re simply getting more product on the shelves. At the same time, they’re conveniently fooling parents into thinking it represents a varied diet, while also minimising the chances of an airway obstruction having some poor kid come to a swift end in a Suzuki Swift and the possible legal repercussions of that.

Outside dad jokes and running family gags, before parenting became a competitive sport, they weren’t there to entertain. Nor were they friends until their kids were in their 20s. There were actual friends for that; all within walking or biking distance and without precision organisation. Parents created and upheld the rules with predictable consequences for breaking them. Dentists were local. Once you were old enough to get yourself places your mum made the appointment, you turned up, and the bill was sent in the post.

It wasn’t a perfect time, and parenthood still wasn’t easy. It was just simpler.

In the decades since, parents of those times have unfairly garnered a reputation of being decidedly mean, uncaring, uninvolved disciplinarians. They were probably more pragmatic and certainly less anxious, and indeed they had better things to do than hover and be guilt-roped by manipulative questions. “No, because I said so” and “When it’s your house, then it’s your rules” were standard responses when it was accepted that adults were in charge and kids were not.

These pouches and packets reinforce a preference for sweetness and smoothness. According to First Steps Nutrition Trust, parents should be actively discouraged from buying them. At twelve months, a child is able to have whole cow’s milk or plant-based equivalents, yet more than 35% are still having formula milk at 18 months. They’re alarmingly high in maltodextrin – known to badly affect tooth enamel. When a baby or toddler is sucking from a pouch, they can’t see or smell what they’re eating and are denied the basic pleasure and ability to recognise fruits and vegetables.

There are huge winners with the clever marketing and product development involved in making early childhood foods and snacks. It’s just not you and its definitely not your kids.

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