My parents got food wrong in so many ways but they got some fundamentals absolutely right, mainly because this was the seventies when home freezers had only just been invented and hardly anyone was fat.

Here’s what they got wrong:

Sweets, cakes, biscuits etc were Naughty, but deliciously so. Banned for most of the time until my father was occasional feeling playful and would give a sort of sideways look (that I lived for) and whisper: “We really, really shouldn’t.” That was the cue to find some fruit cake, which I loathed, or a chocolate digestive, the latter, not surprisingly, still my favourite “greedy naughty” go-to today. Look, we simply didn’t have the neon coloured towers of temptation toppling onto children’s heads from every corner of the supermarket. Though I do remember a few golden months when the milkman began delivering fizzy drinks and I was accidentally bought something called Cream Soda because it sounded safest. (Tank your child up on a glass of that and see what happens. If they still make it…hold on a sec. Great. It is now listed as a Food from Yesteryear…)

“Naughty” almost always means nice. It’s not a word you choose when your child is doing something properly wrong, it’s a gentle chide with humour and often done for show. You know they’re kind of being a pain and you ought to acknowledge it, but no one’s going to die

Anyway, ever the penny watcher, my father bought a sweet shop sized jar of fruit pastilles once a year and I was allowed 6 on a Sunday.

This is what happened. I stole sweets from friends, I saved every penny I could get and spent it all, secretively on sweets. I am still locked into: Sweets are Treats and Treats are Rewards and also Naughty (and Naughty is rather fun).

This was helpful for Old Mum when she was first a Mum. For I knew that there would be only a small amount of time to get this delicate balance right – allowing enough sweet things that they do not become an obsession at the same time as making sure they are delivered as infrequently as possible and child can live without them instead of thinking of nothing else.

As he is currently 9 as I write I am in the perfect position to be able to report back on whether I did just this. But before I do, back to the parents and a couple more things they got wrong. And, in the interests of fairness, although safe in the knowledge that neither are likely to see this (only because neither are agile on the internet. Whaddya mean you’re surprised they are still alive?)…a couple of the things they got right. Albeit inadvertantly.

Very very very wrong and probably illegal somewhere, was having to eat everything on my plate. No wait, there’s more to it than that. I have adapted what happened to me for my boy – in that I put things I know he quite likes on his plate. Mine put things they thought I needed to like on mine and if not eaten, it was returned at the next meal and the next – in various stages of decay and disarray.

I remember very clearly, sitting alone, at the age of 3 in front of something congealed and nasty and sobbing onto the wretched mush on the plate for what felt like hours. Eventually my mother stepped in and the first of a lifetime of conspiratorial solutions was formed. My father never noticed the dog licking its lips in the corner when he came to check up on my progress and I felt no guilt at accepting his praise for the empty plate.

There are other tales which aren’t very nice but all contributed to me, as Old Mum, being torn between my learned instinct to be firm over food and worrying all the time about the children around me who are barely presented with even one of their five a day and whose parents complain ever increasingly that they are now refusing to eat anything but jam sandwiches and twixes.

So here’s what I know. Get every fruit, veg, brown version of carbs and sharp, sour, weird things onto his plate about two months earlier than the T’internet/health visitor tells you (3-4 months old in our case). Make it fun, let him squish, spit and explore it, greet each swallow with raputurous applause and have loads of it visible round the house.

Trust him early on to pour his weird juice concotions from jugs into lolly holders/plates/cups/the dog’s mouth. Lift him into trees to cut elderflowers, hold him as he stirs them on the stove and let him squeeze the lemons to go with it. Give him a pot to grow mint in, let him choose it from the garden centre and when it grows, let him shove it into ice cream or anything he likes.

Ask him to collect herbs for you when you cook, teach him how to use a knife to chop things, get used to asking him to help you make the food even if it stretches your patience to breaking point and you think you haven’t got time, for this is saving you MASSES of time in the long run, please believe me. Watching ridiculous negotiations in a hundred different cafes: (Please please please eat this tiny bit of cheese and you can leave the tomato, look I’ll cut it into 35 pieces and we can spend another hour thinking of bribes to get one of the microscopic pieces down you, thoroughly traumatising you about meals in general so you will end up refusing everything but jam sandwiches and twixes and be an obese teen with an eating disorder) has proven this to me time and again.

As he grows he will refuse things point blank. S’ok, but he has to try it once and then you eat it with great gusto in front of him so he chooses to have it next time.

P.S: What did they get right? We grew food. Well the plants did to be fair. I ate my way through tree fulls of cherries, apples, raspberries, wild strawberries and rhubarb. My father caught fish sometimes. Chicken (I was a meat eater in those days) came from a lady with a smallholding down the road (we had chickens but no one could face eating them) and unsurprisingly perhaps, my father was obsessed with organic whole food so we had solid lumps of pure grain bread and a revolting staple breakfast of raw oats and banana with rasins – it was really nasty and made me cry. I won’t tell you what he did to make me eat it but it was traumatic.

So give your child a muddy hand in the production of the food on his plate, let him feel it, grow some of it, wash it out, peel, chop, smell and taste it. Be firm but fair and obviously, when the ice cream van comes by, let him have a whopping big 99 with 6 flakes and bright blue sauce with neon sprinkles.

Balance in everything.