Regulations on what the school itself will make available: Fine. Sending home pamphlets advising parents on healthy lunches: Fine. Regulating what the parents are allowed to feed their own children: Not fine.
I’m with you. Schools make all kinds of decisions about what they allow on campus. An 18 year old, for example, cannot bring their cigarettes even if it is perfectly legal.
I think it’s a reasonable move. Candy bars, sodas and bags of chips are occasional treats, not main forms of sustenance. There is no reason to be packing these things on a regular basis besides laziness or ignorance. Why should a school enable that? Screw it, it’s not that hard to pack something health.
My son’s grade bans cakes/treats for birthdays. It sucks because I was really looking forward to that this year. (Last year the kidnergarten had done so…perhaps it is a trend. I see some Tiger/Room Moms behind this.) So now we send ‘alternative’ prizes for the classmates. Since there are 45 kids, it ends up being more expensive, actually.
He can only eat a ‘healthy’ snack during snacktime.
He can’t eat any ‘unhealthy’ or ‘treats’ type of food first at lunch - all of the ‘healthy’ food has to be eaten first.
He also has to be kosher, vegetarian, and peanut-free. Oh, and cold food. So I do get pretty irritated if I slip a treat into his bag and he says, “The teacher said I had to finish all the other stuff first.” For Pete’s sake. Let me feed my own damned kid. It’s hard enough. Let him eat the damned piece of chocolate already.
Actually, it’s just regulating what the children are allowed to bring into the school, which IS fine. They’re prevented from bringing all sorts of things into school, at the risk of having them confiscated at best until the end of the day, and at worst forever.
I mean, I don’t think this is a fantastic idea, and I certainly think that the schools should stop offering the kids crap to eat before they start telling you that you can’t send them there with crap, but I can’t get terribly worked up about your “right” to send your kid to school with Twinkies for her 10:15 snack.
Oh, and add: There are some moms who do EVERYTHING orangic but don’t seem to notice that their organic and syrup free food has lots of sugar in it - puffs, krispy cereal bars (is it Enviro-kids?), chocolate spread, sugar yogurt, Horizons sugary sugary milk.
Once, my son had something like this in his lunch:
Some cubed cheese, fruit, a loaded veggie salad (thankfully his favorite), Crystal Light and a handful of chips (not a bag - in a ziploc) and a Hershey’s kiss. The kid next to him says, “Mom doesn’t let me eat that. Chips and candy aren’t healthy.”
Yeah, except his lunch is: Capri Sun, strawberries, bagel & cream cheese, sandwich, and a host of high calorie gluten-free snacks. His dad is a doctor - can’t remember what kind, but iirc a GP - and somehow his mom (or nanny) never got the memo that he’s eating junk for lunch everyday.
Most kids who bring a sack lunch are likely to be eating a lot of high calorie processed stuff anywho. And the ones who eat hot lunch also get chocolate milk and a cookie.
shrug If you want to encourage healthy eating or ban the sale of certain things, okay. But anything beyond that and it’s a mess. Just because something was purchased at Whole Paycheck and has a picture of Big Bird on it and says the word ‘fruit’ and ‘smoothie’ does not mean it’s ‘healthy’.
But my son attends a private school. Most of the kids pack great lunches (and I expect none to be ‘perfect’) but I know it’s different elsewhere. I regularly see my students chugging soda, chips, and coffee for breakfast. If you’re going to ban certain foods, you better make sure what you’re serving is healthier. And tastes good.
Here’s a story from 2009 about a group of Oregon teachers who argued that the teachers’ lounge should be exempt from a school’s no-junk-food-sales rule:
http://news.opb.org/article/teachers-make-case-junk-food-access/
(Bag lunches weren’t regulated at this school; only food actually sold on campus.)
I think part of the reasons these laws are controversial is that they seem to be yet another manifestation of zero-tolerance policies or excessively bureaucratic rules. Teaching better nutrition to students is justifiable, but many parents are going to consider bag-lunch rules an invasion of privacy.
I would find it highly amusing if someone got in charge of one of these programs (or at least in charge of the list of healthy vs. unhealthy foods) and was a strict paleo dieter. Whole grain crackers would be forbidden, lard fried pork rinds commended.
Are they going to force the kids to eat? Kids (and adults for that matter) can be picky. If such a policy had been in place at my school, most likely I would have picked at whatever they forced on me, or just gone hungry until I got home*. That’s hardly conducive to good nutrition or learning.
- And yes I really would have; when they sent us off to “sixth grade camp” where I couldn’t get my own food, I ate almost nothing the whole week. Got pretty sick the one time they made something I was willing to eat, too.
This is my concern about these policies. I have an extremely picky eater, and I send her to school every day with a chocolate chip granola bar for her snack. In some schools, anything chocolate is banned, and that would just suck for me because that’s about the least junky snack I can get her to eat. She will, thank goodness, eat some of the hot lunches, otherwise she’d be having a peanut butter sandwich every single day, as well.
One of the kindergarten teachers at our school has her own classroom policy that snacks have to be fresh fruits or vegetables. I can guarantee that if I sent my daughter with apple slices or carrots, there would be one tiny bite taken out of one of them each day and that would be it. I know, because I’ve tried sending snacks like that plenty of times, and they always come right back home virtually untouched.
Wait, I’m confused. Is your son kosher, vegetarian, and peanut-free because of your rules, or the school’s?
I can kind of see not letting little kids bring peanut stuff to school if there’s a kid who has bad allergies, but schools forcing kids to be kosher and/or vegetarian is taking things waaaaay too far in my book.
I don’t disagree with you, but I still think it would be hard for a school to come up with a reasonable list of acceptable foods, aside from plain raw produce. Yogurt? Hummus? Pitas? Cheese? Crackers? Granola bars? Dried fruit? Juice? All of those things can be pretty healthy or horribly laden with sugar, preservatives, colouring, fat, and/or sodium. So are they ok or not? Who is going to decide which yogurt, for example, is acceptable?
There is nothing stopping a school from making requests of parents but enforcing it is a different matter. My nephew’s grade school teacher asked that pork products not be brought in. Aside from the laughter it generated it was ignored.
My daughter’s medical condition requires a high fat, high sodium, high calorie diet (no, you do NOT want her condition.) We frequently needed to reassure her that the school’s healthy eating classes teachings didn’t apply to her. We also tipped off the teachers, so quite often they’d dispense their conventional wisdom, and then add “but this doesn’t apply to everyone, follow your doctor’s recommendations.”
He has a peanut allergy. So he has to sit at the ‘nut free’ table. But he’s not allergic to tree nuts. However, the teachers put him at the same table as the ‘ix nay on all uts nay’ table. Apparently some kids are allergic to both. So he can’t bring proper granola bars as they may be ‘produced in a factory with tree nuts’. Damn it, teachers, a peanut is a legume! If he does, they’ll place him at the ‘nut’ table next to a kid eating a PB&J. :smack:
The school requires kids bring kosher foods. They also require vegetarian, because you can’t mix meat and dairy and there are 10,000 rules about that. But he’s allergic to soy, so he can’t bring fake chicken, unless it’s the Quorn brand. (No, I’m not kidding.) Soy makes him hurl all over the carpet and his teachers don’t like that. Something that’s number 12 on the list is fine, but stuff that’s mostly soy doesn’t work.
But yes, they do have to bring kosher and vegetarian foods to school. That means stuff should (preferrably) have K or OU or some kind of symbol on it. Oh, and nothing with geletin. It’s quite a headache.
The other day I couldn’t find granola bars that were totally 100 per cent Ok to bring in and he could still sit at the peanut-free table. I finally found some but they weren’t that healthy for you. Still, it would tithe him over during snacktime pretty well. His teacher wouldn’t let him eat it (he ate yogurt instead) during snack because it was 'chocolate chip’.
Don’t even get me into a rant about how short their lunches are…
That was my son’s kindergarten policy last year. A parent had to argue to get her son a special dispensation to bring stringed cheese. After awhile, they allowed yogurt.
If a kid did not have his own snack, they would give him one. Usually something crap, like pretzels or crackers. Oh, and each parent had to pay $35 or $50 for a ‘snack fee’ since we were told that they’d be providing fruits and veggies a few times a week for kids and that we were all expected to chip in to the snack pot. Roll effin eyes. The only thing they bought were prezels and saltines.
I’m really happy my son likes bananas. I’d make little fruit cups and put them in containers for the week. He only likes his veggies heated unless it’s an actual salad. But eating carrot sticks? He thinks that’s weird.
My school as a kid banned sweets (aka candy), though it did permit a small chocolate biscuit. This was 20 years ago.
They didn’t confiscate though- my Grandpa was babysitting once and sent me in with a lunch of pretty much pure sugar, so I found out- they just send a letter asking not to do it again. I have no problem with a few basic rules like that.
This is actually a pretty poor argument. Just because we accept that the administrators can prevent some things things from being brought into the school does not mean that we must accept that the school can prevent anything from being brought into school. As an example, we generally accept that the school can enforce a dress code of some kind but there are limits on the power of the school. Perhaps the most famous dress code case came in Tinker versus the Des Moines Independent School District in 1969 where the school prevented students from wearing black black armbands in protest of the Vietnam War.
Children aren’t mindless automatons who should be subject to the whims of school administrators without just cause. Unless someone can show me how a school lunch interferes with the ability of the faculty to enforce discipline or violates the rights of other students, the school has no business regulating the contents of a school lunch. No, I’m not really upset over the school banning “junk” food. I’m more upset about administrators overstepping their authority.
That supports what I said earlier. The only way you can prevent someone from smuggling in a bag of chips or a candy bar for lunch is to practically have a security check at every entrance examining every lunch bag that comes in.
Of course the school cannot prevent students from ever eating junk food. Of course kids will get around the regulation. That’s not the point. High schools still have a rule against alcoholic drinks even if the kids still sneak in vodka in water bottles. A rule doesn’t need 100% compliance to still be useful.
The idea here is that it sends a message to people at the point when they are forming the eating habits that will serve them to life. This is “soda, chips and candy bars are not a part of a normal meal.” Getting into the habit of always having a bag of chips with lunch or a soda with your meals is a tough one to break, and if it doesn’t make you fat now, it will probably end up making you fat later. It’s better to never get into it. I think it’s great to teach kids that what you eat matters, and that meals should mostly consist of real food.
if a child is actually so picky that the parent can’t walk into a modern supermarket full of everything you could dream of and manage to put together a few healthy lunches, presumably the parent can get a note from the nutritionist who is helping make sure she gets what she needs and the psychologist who is treating her for a crippling aversion to normal food that will eventually have profound health and social consequences.
:rolleyes:
Or we can skip all of that ridiculous nonsense and just let the kid have her damn granola bar. Why does everything always have to be difficult?