Learning for Their World: David Bell's episode

By Sandy Glanfield

When I was a child in the seventies, nobody taught me to eat well. They didn't have to. Food came cooked from scratch, vegetables came from down the road, and a lunchbox snack was just a thing my mum made. That was simply the water we swam in.

The trouble is, the water has changed completely, and we're still trying to teach our children to swim in it using lessons from a river that's long gone.

Think about a child today. What's normal for them is a supermarket aisle of processed, packaged everything, wrapped in marketing designed by people paid very well to make it irresistible. And we expect them, somehow, to choose well, under more pressure to buy than any generation before them. A lot of how we talk to children about food is really a wish that they lived in our childhood instead of their own. But they don't.

So the task, as I see it, is to meet children where they already are, and then walk them somewhere better. Their world is full of screens and games built to hold their attention, so perhaps the cleverest thing we can do is borrow those very tools, not to keep children on a screen, but to send them off it. To use a moment of digital fun as the doorway to something real: reaching for the colourful fruit, noticing what's on their plate. The screen lights the idea; the living happens at the kitchen table.

What I appreciated about David's approach is how carefully he's held that line. Belly Bugs lives on the iPad, deliberately not on the phone, so a child's learning doesn't follow them everywhere. And the whole point of the play is to point outwards, towards real food and real choices. Digital used as a spark, not a destination.

Underneath it all is the thing we hold onto at Reboot: the golden rule, treating others, and the planet, as we'd wish to be treated. Feed the little creatures that keep you well, and they look after you back. And the food that's kindest to a child's own body is very often the kindest to the planet that grew it, so a child learning to look after the small world inside them is quietly learning to look after the great big one outside.

And in the end, for all the talk of screens and microbes, what really wins a child over is wonderfully old-fashioned: a good story that makes them laugh. Which is why it delights me that David's next Belly Bugs book, out this autumn, is called The Poo That Wouldn't Budge. There's a sobering reason such a book is needed: staggering numbers of children are now constipated, their small bodies struggling under a diet of processed food. But leave it to David to meet that with a giggle rather than a lecture. No app, no device to charge, just a book, a laugh, and a child who has no idea they're learning anything at all. Because you can gamify all the science you like, but any five-year-old will tell you the real headline is, and always has been, poo. Quite right too.