Yesterday, when I wrote about Alicia Silverstone being ordered to pay her ex 12k a month in spousal support, Erinn commented with a quote from Alicia’s book, The Kind Mama. Alicia quoted Dr. Oz’s bad take on vaccinations as harmful to children. Dr. Oz has been condemned by his peers for the way his show promotes pseudoscience. I get that he needs a lot of content for a daily show but he promotes so much quackery and bad science. One thing he also promotes which seems slightly less harmful and more sciencey is examining poop to see how well formed it is. Like little rabbit pellets mean we’re constipated, very watery poop is diarrhea, and well formed longer poops mean our diet is balanced I guess. Plus the color of poop can be indicative of health issues. So when Alicia said her son knows about poop indicating health, it’s somewhat sensible compared to some of her other beliefs.
“He knows when he eats well, he poops well. So he knows, as a little kid, that when he doesn’t eat right, his poo changes,” Silverstone, 42, tells PEOPLE. “He’ll be like, ‘Mommy, it’s not coming out!’ So he’s learned through his body and the way he feels.”
“He’ll know when he’s starting to get a little sniffly because the kids around him at school are sniffly, and he’ll say, ‘I think I need to eat more vegetables, Mommy,’ ” she adds. “He’s such a healthy boy. When he does get the sniffles or gets a little cough, he’s still running up the wall.”
I think the sum of the conversations I’ve had with my kid about poop are “please remember to flush.” Of course when they have diarrhea you talk about it and give Imodium or even Zofran if it’s that horrible stomach virus that goes around twice a year. (I keep that stuff on hand now. I learned my lesson after a $600 ER bill for a saline IV and Zofran.) Alicia doesn’t give her son medication either, because he doesn’t ever need it since he’s so healthy from being vegan. I just can’t get on board with talking to my kid about his poop uh regularly. I do have an easier trick to getting him to eat vegetables though. I give them to him first, always before the main dish, and he’ll eat them. After that he gets nonorganic factory farmed steak from the grocery store. (I’m sorry I couldn’t resist! I do buy local meat from the butcher when I feel flush. Also we don’t eat meat every day. I am conscious of the environmental impact. All respect to vegans, etc.)
Nothing wrong with this. Every time the obesity crisis comes up, people argue that BMI is not dispositive of health. So we need to educate about other things!
If we want to stop focusing on being thin, then let’s talk about digestive health and the way food makes you feel.
Agreed! This is not a bs concept…
And, also, microbiome diversity. People who eat a typical Euro-Western diet have half the stomach bugs of eaters in other parts of the world.
I wonder whether he will be ok with his mother giving quotes like this. I understand sharing anecdotes about your kids to friends but I would worry that some kid in the schoolyard will read it and tease him about it. Talk about your own digestive health if it’s so important.
yeah, i understand maybe talking about this kind of stuff with other parents in private, but sharing this with the media and whole world is unnecessary. some parents have trouble with boundaries.
Except the teasing kid’s health and poop works the same way, so…
Plus some kids will tease because they want to tease, and the content doesn’t really matter. If Bear gets teased, I’m sure Alicia has good advice for that too, and will openly talk about it to him like many things, and it might be a character building experience for him.
+1, Olive.
Seriously, I don’t think he’s going to be delighted that his whole life was made public from a very early age. Has he no right to privacy?
If Alicia wants to talk about eating well and pooping well, she should use herself as an example, not a little person who can’t consent.
Problem with that is until you’re of legal age your parents do have the ability to give consent for their kids….
One of my most despised parental behaviors that I see in the age of social media is having no regard for the dignity of your child. I lump this kind of oversharing in with daily updates anout and even PICTURES of toilet training toddlers. How do people not see that their child has dignity? How do parents not feel an obligation to give their child some privacy in these matters? I’m usually an apologist for her but this has gone too far.
Applause, Charlie. Right with you. I regularly cringe at what some parents divulge online about their minors (who can’t consent). My biggest beef are parents slathering their kids’ medical status all over social media. I get how, if your child is sick or in hospital, FB or Tweeting for support can be a coping mechanism for the parents, but it does nothing–and can come back to harm–your children. Medical info is private for a reason! I just can’t handle it.
Honestly, this makes sense to me. Eating well does help with digestion so good for Alicia and her son!
So one lab close to mine studies the gut microbiota and often requires “donors”… It’s $10/poop and it’s for science so of course I’ll do it! But that’s about the only time I get very conscious of the Bristol scale (that’s the consistency scale CB was mentionning). I’m so ised to wanting good grades that I also want to give my friend a perfect turd :/
I often laugh at Alicia but this is about as harmless as she gets. Though I think she goes a little too deep; it’s important that ppl notice when they’re constipated or have very watery stools, but you shouldn’t take that too seriously either. It’s ok to have a stiffer stool sometime and eating lots of iron can do that. As long as there’s no discomfort, your poop is fine.
When I was emptying my grandparents’ place after my granddad died last spring I found a drawer full of “poop diaries”… Finding the 1st one was funny (“oh Grandpa! Really?!”), the 10th one was not… That’s taking stool examination to the extreme!
Also, eating more vegetables won’t help you kill a cold!!! Pfft!
Yeah, nothing wrong with this. Also: nothing to make a fuss about. I LOL’d @ ‘Mommy, it’s not coming out!’ She sounds like the sort of mom who praises her kid to heaven and back for every fart he produces. OF COURSE a child notices when he’s constipated, it hurts! ‘He’s learned through his body and the way he feels’- that’s true for pretty much every human being on the planet. But sure, all hail to Alicia’s son who ‘knows, as a little kid, that when he doesn’t eat right, his poo changes.’
Her “I’m so special, and my kid is even specialler” narcissism is mindblowing. Has she even looked away from her navel once in the past decade?
I’ve told my kids about fiber and how it’s not healthy to go “all the time” but also not healthy to “not go at all.” They know if they have “tummy trouble” they can always talk about it. But I do not think I’ve had any meaningful discussion about feces in my house. Now I’m going to wonder if we should add that to the list of discussions.
Also, an aside – I am not opposed to boys growing their hair out, but at what age does it become appropriate for a boy to start using a ponytail? My son is 6 and we have been letting him grow out his fabulous, wavy, thick black hair, but it’s getting to the point where he could start pulling it back. He goes to school with other boys with longer hair, and they almost uniformly look unkempt or it’s in their faces all the time (since, you know, it’s little boys). is it wrong to think that a boy of a certain age should be pulling his hair back if it’s long enough? I’d tend to think the same of a girl.
Um…
Just go ahead and pull it back whenever it’s unruly and in their eyes at school.
I’ve never in my life heard of an “inappropriate ponytail.”
You’d presume so, but I have never seen one of the long-hair boys at our school with a ponytail! The parents clearly are fine with just letting it hang. Are they worried that putting a scrunchie in his hair is just a bridge too far? (Elastics work to, but I do acknowledge that they can damage hair over time – that’s why schrunchies are actually preferred). At this point, I feel like giving him his sisters’ scrunchies and just letting him go, come what may.
Make him a “man bun”… but just go ahead with the ponytail, it might set a trend!!!
I think it’s really cute to see little boys with long hair. If his hair is in the way and it’s annoying him – why not pull it back?
A guy at work has toddlers with beautiful sandy blonde hair. They pulled the older sons hair into a little ponytail because he was painting or something and kept getting paint in his hair. It was so cute looking.
$600 for a drip! It sounds so crazy to me coming from Canada where treatments like that are “free”
Also for Zofran AND I have insurance. The urgent care sent me to the ER the other day as they were worried that I had a kidney infection (I didn’t). Again I have insurance, the second to highest option available. I just got the bill for $950. All they did was an IV and bloodwork.
Celebitchy the costs of even basic routine things like a saline drip, blood panel, etc are absolutely ridiculous. When it comes to medicine, I know what things cost and I know what they retail at and its shameful. But Zofran is a godsend, other than the constipation (appropriate for this post) that stuff is worth its weight in gold!
That is standard, though! I spent 3 days in the hospital last year and they charge for everything. They charged me a $300 “discharge fee.” I walked out on my own power – no wheelchair, no nothing. Still charged me just to walk out. (The total bill, for some bloodwork, 2 IV medications, Saline, and room and board was around $15,000. We paid for $1,000 of it).
You were actually probably charged MORE because you have insurance. Hospitals can’t charge those on government-backed plans more than actual cost, so they rely on insured patients to make up the difference. There is an outstanding article (available through Google) than ran in Time called “Bitter Pill.” It explains the whole insane system.
And if you don’t have insurance you don’t get the “discounts” from the insurance company, so it can easily cost you double or more than that.
You guys need a universal insurance ASAP. Same for drug insurance. I really don’t understand why it’s taking you so long to revolt against this stupid system
@Arpeggi believe me we try and we organize and we vote. We did keep the House and we’re not going to lose the protections that we have, which is something.
Celebitchy, there is an “allowable” fee for most insurances, and the doctors will sometimes go after your money because they want more. It depends on the provider of the insurance. If you contest the bill, there are places that will forgive it. I had an experience when the emergency room called in a plastic surgeon to give my kid stitches for a cut on her eyebrow area. He charged something like 14,000 which obviously the insurance did not consider “allowable.” I took the extra bill and marched it right to his receptionist saying, we cannot afford to pay this, and I never heard a word about it again. The doctor was kind and did a number of follow-up appointments to check her out anyway–all covered by the initial insurance payment. Stand up to the hospital and try to get that bill erased. It’s worth a try.
I have chronic constipation despite being vegan. Sometimes things are beyond one’s control. I also have something terrible called esophageal achalasia and gastroparesis, which is not caused by or corrected by diet, although diet can help ease some of the more disruptive symptoms. There are times when folks talk about panaceas or the cure-all of a diet approach that drives me crazy. Sometimes it’s not that simple. And when simplicity is presented as obvious, I feel even more broken.
I hear you, I’m an insomniac and I tried all cures. ANd still there’ll be somebody who will tell me about warm milk or hot showers.
While Alicia can be alot to take sometimes, I can’t disagree with her about the importance of gut health and being poop-aware!
It seems like she’s making her son way too obsessed with food. Won’t this lead to anxiety later on in life when he’s truly on his own and doesn’t have his mommy there to tell him what to eat? I don’t know, good eating habits are important but damn this seems like too much !
I don’t think so. Seems like normal mindfulness to me. My kid is super mindful of what she eats and how she feels, and if she complains about poop or tummy issues, we first think about what we’ve eaten and think about how to balance ourselves with more or less fiber, more water, less sugar, etc. It’s basic self care, I think.
I understand. But bowel movements are also regulated by stress/anxiety. You can eat right and still get constipation. The brain/gut is very connected.
I agree. I’m a veggie, my baby son is too. He can’t have dairy so eggs are the only animal product he eats. He gets sick like every little one at daycare and he gets medication. Eating healthy and educate kids about it is very important but she seems obsessed with food. This is kind of a vegan trait. There’s a significant part of the vegan population that lowkey have eating disorders and/or have a very unhealthy obsession with purity, hence anti vaccine stuff and other craziness like feeding a baby with chestnut milk.
I see absolutely nothing wrong with her talking to her son about poop, eating well and etc..
It better for children to to know the facts about how food is related to being healthy and having a healthy stool.
Let’s be honest one bad bout of constipation for a child might make it fearful for them to go to the bathroom
I spent about 4 months this year with horrible stomach issues. I have fibromyalgia, so I have an annoying range of symptoms on any given day – and because of it, I feel stomach pain at a heightened level where someone without a pain condition like this wouldn’t be in the same kind of misery.
I started finally tracking what I was eating – and I finally tracked it down to sucralose. Within an hour of eating it, I’ll be in absolute misery. My body cannot process the stuff. Fibromyalgia can give IBS type symptoms and apparently it’s a trigger for a lot of IBS people. But my god – it’s in SO MUCH STUFF. I bought some mandarin cups the other day – popped one open and thankfully thought to check the ingredients and it had sucralose in it. Took some sleep-eze last weekend – accidentally dosed myself with more sucralose. I have to constantly check labels of everything and my god, it’s used in so much stuff. The one good thing to come from it is that it’ll make me avoid some junk food just out of fear.
She really needs to stop the preaching. She is making herself a goofy cliche at this point.
That little boy looks like a “real pill” as my Granny used to say. Where are his shoes??
He’s free range.
I honestly think everyone needs to talk about this to their children.Many kids have allergies and various health problems that manifest themselves in the digestive system. Colon cancer and other diseases are related to the health of the digestive tract.
Oh no! I wouldn’t give Imodium to a kid with diarrhea (or anyone) as it keeps all the stuff in your body. If you’ve got the squirts (unless there’s some other condition at play) your body is trying to quickly get something out of you, like a bug. Imodium blocks it back up but doesn’t cure anything