Tool Chick's Guide To Life: Advertising for Children 101

When your children are born “Parent” is the first thing you become in an ever-growing list. Peace-keeper. Teacher. Nutritionist. Doctor. Psychologist. You become a jack of all trades. Fathers who never have sewed a stitch in their life suddenly master perfect, tiny stitches when teddy’s head gets ripped off. Mothers who are squeamish at blood cluck soothingly over their tots while cleaning up their skinned knee, applying the Betadine and kissing the whole sickly mess better.

You may not know it yet but parenting will also thrust you into the bright, blingy world of marketing. Unfortunately you won’t be mixing it with glam supermodels – rather all you’ll see is the gritty side of creative invention geared at selling your product.

Recently I acquired Jessica Seinfeld’s “Deceptively Delicious”. It’s an interesting little tome geared around hiding vegetables in foods that appeal to children. In our house we don’t really have the veggie battle – the kids are pretty good at eating their fruit and veg, they just rotate their favourites so fast we don’t always keep up.

But contained within the cookbook were tips from other mums including one who gets her three-year-old to believe plain yoghurt is an awesome dessert by giving her a shaker filled with rainbow sprinkles and letting her top it with a shake or two before eating it. I personally think this is parental brilliance at its best.

I am not a parent that likes to battle my kids. I don’t like the “because I said so” reasoning of yore and I don’t like shouting them into submission. So instead I’ve become the worlds greatest advertiser. We do not eat high-fibre vegetable pasta. We have “Rainbow Pasta”. It isn’t a sub-group of the fruit family called a grape, it’s Mother Nature’s very own high-energy sugar balls.

We don’t stop with food. For Charlotte I used to get her into her clothes by mimicking a commentator at a high fashion show;

“This season you too can step out in the latest design from Mama’s House of Fashion. Charlotte is going to demonstrate for us just how cute a denim skirt can be when effortlessly teemed with striped pippies* and a rock-star T-Shirt…”

And for James I get him to wear his shoes by pretending that if he doesn’t his “piggies” will escape and run all over the place and we may never find them again.

The kids love it. A dose of crafty inspiration and a fair whack of the totally ridiculous and you can get them to do almost anything. Which comes in handy for those sticking points that every child has. For Charlotte, it’s usually food related and top of that list is breakfast. She doesn’t like it. She’d rather skip to 10am and eat a delicious snack than sit down and consume something as dreary as cereal or toast (and our kids are not even aware of the high sugar breakfast alternatives like fruit loops, honey smacks and pop tarts and we plan to keep it that way).

Breakfast consumption is where I have to be at my creative best. Previously I have persuaded her to eat the hated Weeties by pretending that her Daddy’s on a mission to steal them so she won’t grow any bigger or stronger. It worked for about a week and then I had to change tactics. Again.

But recently Charles hit on what has become a rather lasting technique for getting the toast into our reluctant epicurean and I thought I’d share it. It is brilliant in its simplicity. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you The Tower of Toast.

Take four pieces of toast and cut the crusts off each piece.