Care and Feeding is Slate’s parenting advice column. Have a question for Care and Feeding? Submit it here.

Dear Care and Feeding, 

I’m a hot sauce guy. About six weeks ago, my 9-year-old niece, “Kayla,” was at my apartment for the day while her parents took her younger brother to an appointment. I work from home so can easily—and happily—take care of Kayla at short notice.

When I made lunch for the two of us, Kayla saw me add some hot sauce to my plate (as I often do) and asked me what it was. I explained, and she asked if she could try some. I said that the particular sauce I used was probably too hot for her, but I got her a very mild sauce and let her try some. I told Kayla that if she felt it was gross or too hot she could always spit it out and I’d get her a glass of milk, but she loved it. I put some in a little condiment dish for her and she had it with her lunch. Ever since then, she’s been interested in my hot sauces and will almost always ask to try one with her food. I don’t give her the really hot ones, but I do let her choose from a number of “more gentle” and less spicy sauces.

I didn’t think to mention this to her parents as it didn’t feel like a big deal to me. But last week my sister called me and chewed me out for giving Kayla “spicy” foods and said I could’ve damaged her stomach or tastebuds, which are still developing (I did not know this was a thing as I do not have children). I tried to explain that the sauces I’d let Kayla try weren’t actually that hot, and that I’d always offered her a glass of milk or water with each one, but my sister didn’t want to hear it. She has since asked our mother to watch Kayla.

Kayla is sad about this. I am sad about this. I’ve apologized for not asking my sister before I gave hot sauce to Kayla, although deep down I don’t think there’s anything wrong with what I did (she has had other foods at my house that she has never had at home and it was never an issue). My sister is refusing to budge. I was thinking of inviting Kayla, my sister, and her husband over for a “hot sauce tasting day” so they can try the sauces for themselves and see that there’s nothing to worry about. Is this a good idea? What else can I do?

—Hot Sauce Guy

Dear Hot Sauce,

I can relate a bit—a tiny bit—to your sister’s reaction. When it comes to young kids, there are certain safety precautions that simply don’t occur to non-parents, such as keeping heavy and/or fragile objects at least four feet off the floor. (If kids can break something, or use it to hurt themselves, they eventually will. It’s kind of like how a monkey at a typewriter will eventually write Shakespeare, except they’d drop the typewriter on their sister’s foot.)

That said, I think your sister is overreacting. I have never heard of the developing tastebuds thing, and my rigorous Google search for “kids developing tastebuds hot sauce bad” does not turn anything up. Even if there were an age under which you couldn’t give kids hot sauce, I’m pretty sure a 9-year-old would be well beyond it. Hell, I wish someone would make my kids eat more interesting food. Last night my son, 8, refused to eat chicken tenders—the highest-quality takeout chicken tenders you could imagine, we’re talking a giant slab of real chicken cooked to a perfect crisp—because they had touched a pickle.

My point is, I think either your sister has gotten some bad information or there is something else going on here involving her feelings of protectiveness vis-à-vis her brother’s adventurous child-free lifestyle. Seems like it should blow over, but in the meantime, maybe do your best in group settings to emphasize how cautious and mature and boring you’ve been feeling lately? Then, when you’re back in her good graces, you could have her and her family over for a dinner at which point the hot sauce issue, given Kayla’s adoption of your passion for capsaicin, would most likely come up organically.

Dear Care and Feeding, 

I was driving in the car with my 4-year-old son, “Tristan,” the other day with the radio on when a song by Michael Jackson was played. Tristan really liked it and asked if he could listen to more of his songs. I told him I would see what I could do.

This really puts me in an unsettling position. I believe the men who say Jackson victimized them as children and feel that to buy and play his music would be a slap in the face to them and all survivors of child sex abuse. The problem is I obviously can’t tell Tristan the reason for my objection because he’s 4. Right now he’s young enough that he’ll forget about it fairly soon, but there’s going to come a time where I have to explain this to him. At what age should that be, and what is a good approach to it?

—Not Going to be a Thriller for Me

Dear Thriller,

This is, I’m sure, a common conundrum, and not just when it comes to Michael Jackson, given how much the #MeToo era revealed about all sorts of male artists and entertainers engaging in sexual and domestic behavior ranging from the pathetic to the violently criminal.

It’s a tricky thing. If a given artist has died, you’re not really rewarding them for their behavior by listening to their music or watching their movie. I also think I hold the vague belief that since every human is imperfect, limiting ourselves to art made by people who were truly heroes and role models would mean excluding ourselves from a very meaningful and necessary part of existence. I mean, I recently ended up on French composer Claude Debussy’s Wikipedia page and wow, what an asshole!

And yet, it’s a lot easier to bracket out Claude Debussy’s bad behavior—to consider his music as an expression of an ideal, the manifestation of a cosmic spirit that he was merely channeling as an imperfect vessel, etc. blah blah blah—than it is to do the same for a contemporary artist like Jackson, whose transgressions have created wounds that are yet to heal or fade from memory (and yes, the fact that the allegations against Jackson involve minors makes them partiuclarly awful).

It’s a line everyone is left to draw on their own, and on any topic like this, my thinking is usually that the best thing you can do for your kids is to, eventually, tell them the whole complicated story. I think you’ll know when it’s time, and in the meantime, you can tell a little kid that you’re not playing Jackson’s music because that person was “not nice” if that’s what you need to do. The one thing I would say prescriptively—referring to the consensus of medical experts— is that I don’t think 4 years old is too soon to introduce the idea of boundaries around touching and private parts. How much to incorporate that into a “separating the art from the artist” conversation is up to you.

—Ben

Classic Prudie

I’m in my mid-20s and just got engaged to a sweet, funny, and attentive guy, whom I love very much. The problem? He’s a very picky eater. He eats only about 10 things, all stuff you’d see on a kids’ menu, such as chicken fingers, fries, plain pizza, and grilled cheese. He doesn’t have a good explanation for it; he just says he doesn’t like the textures of other foods. He knows it’s a problem but doesn’t do anything to work on it. This bothers me for several reasons.