Mustard Allowance

When Ray was eight years old, he loved mustard. Perhaps I should clarify that he loves mustard today as well, and no less than he did when he was eight. If you give him an excuse to have mustard, it does not matter which brand, he will pile a mountain of it on his plate and every piece of meat or chicken will be heavily coated with the yummy yellow condiment (Actually, I cannot stand the thing, but whatever works for him…).

Mustard is a fine thing to like, with health benefits on top of making your meal more tasty. But contrary to what kids (and some comic-book villains) think, you can have too much of a good thing. What’s important is balance, and this was something Ray lacked. There were times where the food-to-condiment ratio was 1:2, in favor of the condiment.

When we began to notice this —

(Well, let’s be honest here. I did not notice this, and would never have noticed it on my own. My wife is the one who notices details like this, and brings them to my attention. But let’s ignore that detail, shall we?)

So, when we began to notice this pattern, and saw the drops of mustard turn into ponds and then into mountains, we began commenting on it. “Ray, please don’t take so much. You are drowning your food in mustard and that’s not good”. This comment would inevitably be heard around the lunch and dinner table whenever we would sit down to eat as a family, usually during the weekend.

Managing Complexity

It went on like this for a few weeks, or months. I don’t remember.

What I do remember is realizing, at some point, that it was never going to stop. Remember how I mentioned that my wife notices details? Well, I’m pretty blind to those. I make up for it by noticing patterns (more on this later). However, there is one detail I notice quite efficiently, and it has served me and my marriage well: when my wife gets frustrated, I notice. So, usually, things go like this:

Step 1: Michelle notices an annoying detail about life, which I ignore.

Step 2: Michelle tries to fix it, while I look on with confusion, not even realizing there is something to fix. I forget about it moments later.

(…some time later…)

Step 37: Michelle gets frustrated that the problem does not go away after trying to fix it two dozen times, and this I notice. I then figure out the pattern, and actually spend time trying to see how I can help.

So, par for the course, it took a while till I woke up to the problem. Till then, I would support my wife with her per-case efforts to teach Ray how to manage his portion size, and each meal went by with only a small wave of annoyance. But as time passed, Michelle began to get frustrated. It seemed to her that Ray was simply ignoring her and what she was teaching him. It felt disrespectful.

My attention finally on this issue, I began to watch Ray closely during the meals. Was he really being disrespectful, asserting his independence? It did not seem so. It also did not seem to me that he lacked comprehension, from a logical, mental perspective. Ray understood that too much was not good, and he did not argue (much) when we told him to hold off. But the bottom line was that it did not prevent him from eating lots of mustard when left to his own devices.

Clearly, we needed to take a different approach. It was not only the lack of success with Ray that troubled me – it was also the fact that we were spending so much time each meal tracking his mustard quantities, instead of talking about our day. One of the mantras I’ve adopted in many areas of my live has been “Don’t master complexity – extract simplicity”. It was time to find a simpler way to manage this issue.

Extracting Simplicity with Mustard

Gathering Insights

Looking at Ray, I realized that he had no way to measure if he was taking too much or too little. Most of us learn from past experience, but the “correct” amount of mustard was not something that could be clearly defined. I also guessed that he lacked some spatial instinct about how to match the amount of food on his plate to the amount he was taking.

Additionally, he really loved this food, this condiment, which seemed to me to activate certain impulsive reactions. I had noticed, for instance, that Ray would scrape his plate to get the very last bits of mustard off his plate. Clearly, he had a strong internal drive to get as much as he could. The strong drive, coupled with vague boundaries, were likely the reason why we kept on having to tell him off for taking too much.

What we needed was a better way for him to visualize the amount he was taking, and also give him a stronger drive to counter the desire for more mustard. And we needed it to be something that didn’t require more work from us as parents – something that would be simple, and ideally would teach him portion control also for times that we were not there.

Introducing: Mustard Allowance!

Armed with these observations, we enacted a new system in our house: the Mustard Allowance.

Every week, on Sunday, Ray got a bottle of Heinz Mustard, which was his favorite. “This bottle is yours,” we told him, “you can use it any way you want, any time you want. You can pour it all on your plate in a single meal, or spread it out over the week.”

“But,” we explained, “this is all you have. When this bottle is finished, you have no more mustard till next Sunday.”

The effect was fantastic, and achieved all that we had set out to achieve.

Visualize and comprehend amounts. We now saw Ray taking care how much mustard he gave himself each meal. Every drop he used now, was a drop he would not have later. Also, we always have family meals on Friday night and Saturday morning, so that meant the end of the week was the time with the best food and biggest portions – he did not want to end up then without any mustard on his plate. He made sure to save up for those last days all week.

Harnessing Desire for Control. Not only was he able to see his mustard amounts decrease with each usage, this also triggered the very same reflexes that made him eat more: his desire to have mustard also warned him about using up all the mustard too soon.

Simple. We, as parents, only had to be in charge of giving him the mustard bottle once a week. That’s it. No commenting during the meal, no nit-picking on exactly how much is too much. Gone were the days of constant peeking at his plate and getting frustrated.

Final musings

What to take away from this story? As usual, the main point is to pay attention, deeply, to your kid. This solution would not have worked with everyone. In Ray’s case, the fact that he tends to err on the side of caution helped once he realized the price he would pay for excessive use. Other children, or at a younger age, might not have benefitted as much from this mode. You always need to tailor the solution to the child.

But I would say that, with every child, if you find yourself handling the same problem again and again, it’s worthwhile understanding why it keeps coming up, and how you can restructure things so that the problem does not arise as much. As the Hebrew saying goes – “A smart man knows how to solve lots of problems. A wise man knows how to avoid those problems in the first place.” With a little bit of attention, we could all grow much wiser.