School Dinners - children eating pudding first?

[MissingLincs]

I work in a primary school and sometimes help out in the dining room at lunch time. I hear the dinner ladies telling the children to eat up and eat some more and eat your dinner before your pudding (which is what my mum always told me as a child growing up in the sixties). When I mentioned it to my daughter, she told me that the dinner ladies should just let the children eat as much as they want in whatever order they want to.
As mums... please give me your honest opinion of how you would feel if your child only ate a little bit of their dinner or ate their pudding first and left their main course?

Just to add... our school kitchen cooks from scratch.

With my eldest, she always ate sandwich, then cake/yoghurt, then fruit. And I used to feel surprised as the other children got their pack lunch out and ate cake followed by fruit then sandwich.

When dc2 came along I discovered that if I said to her to eat the sandwich first, she then ate almost nothing. Perhaps a nibble of the sandwich, then that would be it. If I ignored the order then she'd eat all the cake/yogurt, then the fruit and almost always then eat all the sandwich.

So it was far better to let her eat in the order she liked and then she ate (normally) all of it, then nag her to eat in the "correct" order and eat nothing.

@MeredithGreyishblue

I don't agree with schools giving puddings with lunch at all really.

I get it's the only hot meal some kids get to eat. But it sets a habit that's entirely unnecessary.

I'm the big bad wolf at home because I don't allow a "pudding" after every single meal. Fruit, fine. Sometimes biscuits. If we feel like a bar of chocolate of an evening, fine.

But there's just no need to offer school puddings. Use the cash for a decent main course instead.

Completely agree, infuriates me they get offered a proper dessert every single day; just once or twice a week would be perfect.

Certainly not a big bad wolf - we do not have pudding/desserts at home; fruit or otherwise. Not that they never get fruit/cake/sweets but we are just not in the habit of having sweet alongside/after each meal.

It's interesting that your child's school serve the pudding separately. We serve on a 'flight tray'.
I work in a school where about 300 children have school dinner, with most on free school meals whether they are government free meals up to year 2 or universal credit key stage 2 children.
Sadly, the food wastage is generally untouched vegetables and, for the older children, food they personally didn't choose. We often get upset children because they don't want what has been pre- ordered for them.

I'm not sure what they do in my dc's school (mine have packed lunches. I would rather they eat their sandwiches before their cereal bars though, simply because that seems most filling) but many of the schools I have worked in recently have changed from serving everything at once to serving the main first and then the pudding, although I'm not sure why.

I agree re. the wasted veg: yesterday hardly any of the children I saw ate their veg. It could be because it had gone cold by the time it was on their plates?

I'm the big bad wolf at home because I don't allow a "pudding" after every single meal. Fruit, fine. Sometimes biscuits. If we feel like a bar of chocolate of an evening, fine.

That's what the postings are like in a lot of schools now: fruit and yoghurt, yoghurt on its own, a small pancake with some fruit etc etc. It's not always cakes and custard. Remember also that children on fsm may not have much else to eat, as you acknowledged in your post, so a pudding helps towards providing some much needed calories, especially as so many children don't eat all of their main meal. I don't think that's because of the quality either; they look and smell much nicer now than the crap I was given when I was a child.

Thanks for all your replies... They are an eye-opener of how things have changed from when I was at school.
We have a 30 minute time slot for each year group but always have some still eating when their classmates go out to play.
Any child with packed lunch take home anything not eaten (and also empty wrappers) but we still get parents complain we don't give enough time to eat even though the children say they don't want it or say they don't like it (we always have children eating beyond the 30 minute time slot). We hear from other children that some packed lunch children 'accidently' drop their sandwiches on the floor to avoid eating them.
Our school kitchen has windows that open out towards the footpath alongside the school and the parents waiting to bring the children into school or are walking by at 8:40am often comment how nice it smells but when the onions are cooking for the lasagna the children hold their noses and ask what the smell is. I guess they don't cook from scratch in their house!

Ours have to at least try the main before pudding, if they don't touch it they don't get pudding - that happened once with DD in reception, never again.