In my last post, I took Dara-Lynn Weiss to task for the tactics she used to get her seven-year-old daughter to lose weight. I was speaking as a psychologist, having treated many (mostly) women with clinical eating disorders and also those with what’s been called a “normative discontent” about their bodies.

But I’m a mother, too, and I often grappled with how to promote healthy dietary habits in my own kids, now all in their twenties and no longer within my direct sphere of influence, dietary or otherwise. Looking back, I can see that some of the ways I tried to nourish them were sound. But I also made my share of mistakes, vacillating between acceding to their pleas for sugary snacks and trying to implement stricter food rules.  So in the spirit of the parenting confessionals that have become so popular these days (book deal, anyone?), I’ve decided to go public with some of my experiences.

I fed my first baby no processed foods or sweets. She was a paragon of healthy eating—until she turned one, that is, and got her first taste of homemade birthday cake (carrot with cream cheese frosting, which she still requests to this day). She stuffed fistful after fistful into her mouth before she fell dead asleep in a sugar coma, head on the tray of her high chair and face smeared with cream cheese and crumbs.

I was a little more lax with my second daughter, choosing ease of preparation over nutritional value. As a result, she became hooked on frozen fish sticks. I once tried preparing a more wholesome version from scratch with cod and breadcrumbs. But, then as now, being in possession of a highly discriminating palate, she rejected the substitute.

It was all down hill from there. By the time the third kid came along, convenience foods had completely infiltrated my kitchen. Graham crackers and juice boxes were easy to feed my toddler in his car seat as I chauffeured his two older sisters to school and gymnastics. McDonald’s became a too frequent destination. So it’s no wonder my son’s first two-word sentence was “mo’ soda.”

When my kids were in elementary school, I instituted a radical approach I’d come across in a book somewhere.  Tired of the nightly dinner table whining (“Can we have dessert now?”), I decided to start serving dessert with dinner—peas, potatoes, chicken, ice cream, all together. The rationale was to give every food group equal status, making dessert just one component of a meal rather than a reward for a clean plate or good behavior. If the kids didn’t think of sweets as forbidden fruit, maybe they wouldn’t go so crazy over them. It made sense to me at the time, and it worked. Or so I thought.

The experiment didn’t turn out as I’d hoped. One day my daughters pulled me into the family room and gleefully showed me what they’d unearthed from behind the couch cushions:  a stash of empty, crumpled candy wrappers big enough to have filled all the Trick or Treat bags in the neighborhood. Their brother was busted, and we went back to serving dessert in the conventional fashion.

The unintended outcome didn’t dissuade me, however, from trying a similar method with each of them when they were high school seniors, only this time with beer and wine instead of sweets. I hoped that letting them see how an alcohol buzz feels—while in the safety of their own home (and legally, in our county)—would make it unnecessary for them to turn drinking into an act of teenage rebellion. For the same reason, a consortium of college presidents has been advocating lowering the drinking age to eighteen. So I offered them the occasional glass of Cabernet or a bottle of IPA during holiday dinners. Although I’m not suggesting this approach would be appropriate for all teens, particularly those with a family history of alcoholism or those with impulse-control problems, it worked pretty well with mine. To my knowledge, with the exception of a few embarrassing, alcohol-fueled incidents in their collective histories, they’ve all turned out to be fairly responsible drinkers.

As for eating, they’ve each developed their own distinct preferences, some healthier than others. My oldest daughter has been a vegetarian since she was thirteen, more out of compassion for animals than from a desire for greener eating. She relies heavily on frozen dinners from Trader Joes, which she microwaves in the tiny kitchen alcove of her studio apartment while she’s hitting the books. My middle daughter, the erstwhile fish stick connoisseur, is my culinary soul mate. We swap recipes, and she’s introduced me to her favorite food blogs and restaurants. My son favors red meat, a taste he can indulge often in Austin with Texas barbeque.

And he still loves chocolate.