Why does society prevent children from drinking coffee? What's the harm in kids drinking coffee? It's not whisky. It's not gin. It's not beer. It's not a narcotic. It's not a hallucinogen. It's a natural bean - grown in clean mountain air - that's been diluted in hot water.
Kids drink hot chocolate and Coke. Those are made from beans too - cocoa and cola beans. And, they have more caffeine than coffee beans. So what's the big deal with coffee being banned for kids? Coffee is a pure vegetable product. It doesn't have the preservatives, dyes, stabilizers, or the artificial additives that kids eat constantly.
Kids pack themselves full of breakfast cereals, like Kellogg's "Frosted Flakes," which is 40% sugar by weight; Kellogg's originally named it "Sugar Frosted Flakes," and with good reason. The image of kids spooning bowels of that stuff into their faces is an American icon; and they load themselves with whole milk, containing lactose, saturated fat, cholesterol, traces of heavy metals, pesticides, herbicides and other agricultural residues.
Breakfast for kids is a twisted fiction. They eat frozen waffles, pastries, jelly-filled powdered donuts, icing-covered toaster pops that look like cartoonish floppy disks. And cereal. Chemical factories in the shapes of pellets, wafers, nuggets, tubes, flakes, beads, and toys. And this is accepted as the norm. Then they trudge off to school in their Herman Munster wardrobes and begin to wage war.
Curiously, it seems unnatural for a kid to eat a normal breakfast. When do you ever see a kid in front of eggs, bacon, toast, fresh fruit, real juice, hash browns, and an honest cup of coffee? You never see that. Why do boxes of Captain Crunch and Hostess donuts seem like the normal fare for kids? The kids are perceived as insipid, raving snack machines that can convert any sugar-dense chemical cocktail into living flesh. There was even a TV commercial that promised Moms they could "keep 'em home for breakfast," and showed the TV Mom luring the kids back from the front door waving an open box of donuts.
Yet adults, generally, are infuriated - even sickened - by the sight of a kid drinking coffee. When I was about seven, I loved drinking coffee. But, it was a constant struggle to get any. My mom occasionally let me sip hers, or she gave me a little coffee with a lot of milk. And God help us if her friends ever saw me drinking coffee - they got hysterical: "You'll stunt his growth!" Yet, today kids seem to be bigger than ever; they look like monsters. I think they wear those mammoth pants to disguise just how big they really are.
The other day I saw some girls in Wal-Mart; they must have been maybe twelve or thirteen years old. They were monstrous! At least six-feet tall, and with legs that looked like cast iron lamp posts. They're huge today. They never used to be so huge. No wonder these teen boys and girls are always wearing "tank tops." They have to because they are tanks. How'd they get to be so damn big? I guess they didn't drink any coffee, because that would have stunted their growth. And these guys - maybe 8th graders or something - they are pounding around in stores in tennis shoes the size of ski boots. The laces are flailing around like weed whackers as they clear a path down the skateboard isle. Their legs and feet are so big that they wear out those skateboards and they have to buy new ones all the time.
Coffee is an "adult" drink. I think adults simply want to have one thing they can do that kids can't do. "Having coffee" is an adult thing; it's totally different from "drinking coffee." Kids really can't "have coffee," in the best sense of those words. All they can do is drink it. I didn't "have coffee" until I was about 25. Actually, adults want to have coffee so they can get away from their kids.
Look at the spacey ads for coffee. It's an escape from life. These are idyllic moments of freedom and tranquility that let grown-ups transcend their dreary, anguished lives. Having coffee is a precious time, a special time for adults; a time for real friends; a time to be yourself. So, naturally, adults resent kids for wanting to horn in on having coffee; adults are a tribe that fiendishly wants to keep the "having coffee" ritual preserved only for themselves.
Truthfully, when I see kids drinking coffee I resent it. I think, "What the hell do those kids know about coffee? They haven't suffered enough yet. So, why should they warrant the relief from suffering, which is brought about by having coffee? By adult standards, kids don't deserve coffee. They haven't earned the right. Adults think, "These kids are basically just little shits, and we don't want them to have any coffee."
Elementary and junior high school authorities enforce this no-coffee mandate. It's an unwritten law, like dogs procreating in the middle of the street. There's no statute exactly prohibiting that, but it's sort of against the common law - the laws of propriety. There are no actual laws that say kids can't buy, sell, possess or drink coffee. But it's such a strong feeling, an implied mandate, and so intensely believed by adults, that it is carried out as if it were an actual law.
Kids can't get a cup of coffee in a school cafeteria until they get into high school. And, even then, it's tantamount to bending the law. They know they're playing with an adult thing, like an initiation rite. High school kids don't even know what they're doing yet with coffee; they're still experimenting with it, emotionally.
Twelve-year-old girls can get pregnant and have babies. They can take drugs, run away from home, and hold up liquor stores and drink the liquor. This is all somehow accepted, in a sort of deviant way. But those same girls can't have coffee. That cup of coffee violates the immutable difference between their 12-year-old status and the grown-up world. Ironically, the actual written laws they break don't threaten society as much, because those laws don't strike out at our identities: the roots of who we are.
A twelve year old boy can get semi-automatic weapons and gun down his classmates, attack his teachers, steal cars, sell cocaine, or start a computer consulting business. But in the school cafeteria they won't let him have a cup of coffee. It might stunt his growth. And, it all makes perfect sense. That same boy, only six years later can legally be shipped off to a jungle in a foreign country and have his face blown off by a Howitzer. People will be saddened by that, but they will accept that fate as the price we pay for maintaining democracy in the jungle. Six birthdays later, six Christmases later; just six years after he couldn't get coffee in 8th grade, his liver is splattered out across a rice paddy.
Tobacco companies are seething to get kids to start smoking, vis a vis, Joe Camel, and all the rest of the cigarette mythology focused on kids. It's a billion-dollar market, and they want to get it. But, so is the market for coffee! It's a billion-dollar kid market that's completely untouched. What if the big coffee companies started to go after kids, like the big cigarette companies already do? What then?
They could start advertising coffee for kids. That's not against the law. They could advertise on cartoon shows, with redesigned packaging and graphics, new brand names, and show kids drinking coffee. They could suddenly make coffee look "cool for kids." After all, what really goes better with a Marlboro than a cup of Folgers? They're a natural. You take a drag, you take a sip. It just feels right.
The problem, of course, is the opposition by adults. It would be too big a problem to overcome. The fantasy of the Kool-Aid-kid-type soft drinks is incompatible with the hard-won maturity of Yuban, Maxwell House, and Hills Bros.
A hot cup of brew is the last stronghold that separates childhood from its loss of innocence - that careening fall in the abyss of horrors called adulthood. Adults seem to have forgotten that the horrors of childhood were actually far worse than those of adulthood, so perhaps the coffee blockade serves to perpetuate the fantasy of the idyllic childhood that never actually existed? So, what would actually happen if little kids became coffee drinkers? Their growth wouldn't be stunted; but, the religion of childhood-worshipping would never be the same again.