Words by Sean Szeps
My children could be gay and it wouldn’t bother me in the slightest. They could be right-wing, a Doomsday prepper, or even a conspiracy theorist and I’d still invite them to Christmas lunch. There is, in fact, almost nothing that my children could do that would make me love them any less.
But if they couldn’t eat spicy food? I’d kick them to the curb that very day. “Not under my roof!” I’d shout, brandishing a bottle of Tabasco like a gay suburban priest performing an exorcism.
I love spicy food. My husband loves spicy food, too. I’m not saying it’s why I married the man, but I’m not saying it wasn’t in the Top 3 reasons I accepted his proposal either.
We bonded over spice very early on. I knew he was “the one” when we both started sweating through our shirts over a Pad Ped Moo Krob in a Southern Thai hole-in-the-wall in New York City for our third or fourth date. We got engaged in Thailand over a spicy curry and have spent more holidays than I care to admit wandering through Bangkok markets with tears streaming down our faces. Not from emotion, but from chilies.
As the old saying goes: Marry someone who likes Thai food as much as you, and you’ll be happy forever. Or something like that.
When we decided to have kids, we knew we were in for a spicy food reckoning. Children are infamously bland eaters. Just look at the kids’ menu at 90% of restaurants in Australia: it’s beige-on-beige. Nuggets, with a side of fries and maybe a limp half-slice of tomato for “colour.” Too much cracked pepper is considered a hate crime.
So what happens when two spice addicts willingly bring tiny humans into the world and need to start thinking about cooking family meals? There are really only three options:
Option one: Make two meals. A boring one for the kids and a flavorful one for the adults.
Option two: Take a hiatus from spice entirely and sacrifice your tongue’s happiness for the greater good of the family, making one spice-free meal.
Option three: Figure out what Thai, Indian, Korean and Mexican parents have been doing for centuries.
We chose option three.
While most expectant parents were researching baby-led weaning and debating paint swatches on Pinterest, I was online trying to figure out how to build a chili tolerance in infants. And somewhere in the multi-day-long doom scroll, the algorithm delivered me a video of an Indian mum explaining with the casual air of someone discussing nappy brands that she, and all the mums she knew, simply micro-dosed their babies… with curry.
“Just a smidge mixed with rice”, I recall her staying. “A whisper of heat to jumpstart their palates.”
I felt seen. I watched that video three or four times and thought: I, too, will indoctrinate my children into the religion that is chili. I will raise kids this way.
So after our twins were born in 2017, I started micro-dosing them with various curries. After every Thai or Indian delivery night (and there were many), I’d save the leftovers. The following days, I’d sneak microscopic amounts into their rice or noodles like some sort of culinary cult leader.
Something miraculous happened. They didn’t just tolerate spice, they wanted it. Asked for it. Craved it.
Now, eight years later, my children’s favourite food is Tom Yum soup. Tom. Yum. Soup. They ask for kimchi and spicy salsas. They experiment with hot sauces and will give burning peppercorns a go. As long as there are carbs and a creamy sauce nearby to cool things down, they’re all in (my daughter more than my son, to be fair).
But let’s be honest: it wasn’t all smooth sailing.
There was a moment, one I won’t forget, when I thought I’d pushed it too far. We were at a Thai restaurant in Glebe and, riding high on a string of toddler wins, I decided to skip the whisper and go full sentence. I offered my son a small bowl of chicken green curry with rice. He took one bite of straight curry. He stopped and stared at me. His face went red and then came the tears.
You know that moment in every parenting journey where you think, “Oh god, I’ve ruined it. I broke the child.” That was my moment. I thought I’d blown it forever, that this very mouthful had turned him off spice for life. That my dream of raising adventurous eaters had gone up in flames.
But kids are amazing, aren’t they? He bounce back. A few days later, we were back at home with a Tom Yum soup. He paused, looked at the bowl in front of him and said, “Yum yum soup.”
I could have cried.
We love spicy food the way some people love their firstborns: fiercely and with zero compromise. And it turns out, the bland kids’ menu isn’t a global epidemic. It’s just a Western problem. Our standards for flavour are (mostly) on the floor, next to a bag of frozen dino nuggets.
Raising spice-loving kids isn’t just about food. It’s about believing our children can handle more than we think. More heat, more adventure, more difference. If you serve it with love (and maybe a side of rice), they’ll surprise you every time.
