Got tea?
I remember the looks I got from the other moms in the park when I admitted that my daughter, at the time only 3 years old, liked tea.
“Aren’t you worried about the caffeine?” one mom ventured?
Not particularly, I told her. Especially since it didn’t seem to have any impact on her sleeping. She drank it because her father, an Englishman, and I, drank it every night after dinner. It was a cultural tradition that we were simply passing on to her.
I continue to get the occasional raised eyebrow when I mention my kids’ love of tea, as if I were permitting some sort of barely-legal activity.
But kids all over the world drink tea. In Britain, little kids come home not to milk and cookies (”That just sounds so off to me,” my English husband once admitted), but to tea and biscuits (biscuit being their word for what we’d think of as a cookie but their cookie means…oh never mind, it’s too complicated). Kids in China, Japan, Korea, and India all grow up with tea.
It’s now been well-established that tea is good for you. How good is still being debated.
But Americans aren’t tea drinkers. We prefer other, less healthy sugary drinks. And although premium tea (and the corresponding “tea houses”) is now a growing beverage segment, we still don’t generally accept tea as a child’s drink.
Indeed, as immigrants move to this country and adopt our diet, their children stop drinking tea — and fall prey to all the usual Western maladies such as obesity and diabetes.
But my kids are half-English, and they drink a lot of tea, to no ill effects at all. Indeed, these days they insist on their cup of “honey tea” every night before bed. It’s a warm, relaxing ritual that, if the health claims are right, will put them in good stead.
I grew up in England, and I knew many families that gave babies tea in their bottles. While I think that might be overkill, I agree that there is nothing wrong with giving children tea, especially given the health benefits.