Tea and Children II
i don’t have children, so i have no experience with them other than what i’ve seen and learned as a kid. children do like fruit juices, i did as a kid. so fruit may be good to start off with (i would, for my kids, if i had any) now about caffeine, i don’t know weither or not fruit teas have caffeine. below is a small list of sites with a fair amount of fruit teas you can order.
www.teavivre.com <—- (most of my online orders are from here)
Thanks, Kirk-tonight I had planned to try Teavana Strawberry Lemonade on the kids but they fell asleep while it was steeping. ;-) There’s always tomorrow!
Blech…I am not crazy about the strawberry cream tea I have…now you gave me a
a great idea who to try it one… ;-)
hopefully i can try other ruit teas by teavana sometime. :D
Edit: alas, i have enough tea for now.
Adagio has 3 new sets os kid friendly teas.
TREE HOUSE
http://www.adagio.com/gifts/tree_house_bags.html
FAIRY TALES
http://www.adagio.com/gifts/fairy_tales_bags.html
My youngest is 13, and she has asthma. She gets up every morning and has a cup of whatever she chooses (not decaf). There have been several studies done showing that caffeine can help asthmatics breathe easier for 2-4 hours. We go ahead and let her drink it, and it IS better for her than soda.
Also caffeine has a calming effect in people with ADHD/ADD, and tea fit the bill when my 20 yr old was younger. And he still prefers tea over coffee :)
I didn’t know that about ADHD/ADD, though it makes sense (since Ritalin is a stimulant). Maybe I should give my son a bunch of tea and see if he calms down. He’s never been diagnosed with ADD and he doesn’t have trouble concentrating in school but he is a bundle of energy and I suspect that there are doctors out there who would diagnose him as ADHD. Interesting about the asthma, too. We don’t have asthma sufferers in our household, but it’s still great information to have.
Reporting in with what I remember of tea when I was little!
I remember when I was a kid (6-10-ish I think) I loved Celestial Seasonings blends. Not sure if I’d still like them now, but between the fairytale-like boxes and all the different flavors I was always asking for new ones. They also tend toward sweet flavors. Numi was another I liked, and the occasional Bigelow (but never Twinings, that was mom’s gross breakfast tea! haha). Tazo wasn’t around yet, but their blends are pretty accessible. If you want to go that way maybe take them to the tea aisle at the grocery store and let them choose a box they want to try. It’s an inexpensive way to get them interested in new flavors, and if they choose it themselves they’ll probably be even more excited about it.
Fruit is definitely a good way to go; honestly, I’m not sure I even touched black tea until I was in my late teens, let alone green or anything else! But if they’re curious about it you can always give it a try, maybe with some basic flavors (green tea with lemon?). Anything they would choose to eat, they’ll probably like to drink. Another thing I loved as a kid was rosehip tea, because it tasted like sour candy when I put honey in it.
bluebelle, love the idea of letting them pick boxes from the tea aisle at the grocery store. I think some of these are assortments, too, and that might be fun. Great ideas, thanks!
Tea Gallerie has a really cute kids line. I was tempted to buy some at a tea festival purely on the cute tins. The tea is pretty yummy tasting too.
My family was pretty liberal on the tea when we were kids, mostly during meals and not as an ‘anytime’ beverage though. In our house (and my friends’ houses) they would give kids either the first cups of the first steep (like 10-20 seconds) while the adults waited for the tea to get darker, and if we wanted seconds it was usually by the time the tea pot had been refilled two or three times already. It was almost always black, green, or oolong, and always straight though. Alot of asian families I know do this though, so as we grow up it’s just normal to keep drinking tea. For my 5yr old cousin I make sure the tea she has has already had a few steepings, or is diluted 4:1
One of my chinese friends can drink pots and pots of tea and not feel a thing, but bounces off the walls whenever she gets a chai tea latte from starbucks. It’s probably the sugar.
I can account for the caffeine thing helping asthmatics! Well, it may be a placebo, but I’ve noticed a nice cup of tea (or coffee or soda) helps when my asthma decides to act up. It’s not comparable to an inhaler, but if its going slowly and you’re maybe ten minutes away from outright wheezing, I like to take a coffee break and make my tea really really dark.
I used to not feel caffeine, or at least I thought I didn’t. I would drink coffee late at night and then go to bed. But as I’ve become older I’m finding that I’ve also either become more sensitive to it—or maybe I just notice it more? I did take No Doze once when I was in high school and I thought I was going to die, but that was a super concentrated dose. ;-)
I don’t have kids, but I’m a kid at heart, does that count? XD
This: http://steepster.com/teas/tealish/19076-razmintazz is hands-down one of my favorite decaf teas. Iced, it tastes like a less-sugary blue icee!
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