Jamie Oliver links Asthma to school dinners - on Parky this Saturday

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Did anyone watch this weeks School Dinners? Was everyone else as staggered as me and Jamie O by the look of him, when the school Nurse said that they did not need to give out mid-day inhalers since the introduction of his healthy dinners?

C&P from JO website:

We're nearly at 100,000 signatures on the FMB Petition - WOW! We've just raised the bar again - this time to 150,000. Thank you everyone for taking the time to sign. Not long til we take them all to number 10.

Be sure to watch this saturday's edition of Parkinson on saturday night. I'm a guest and I talk about some of the highs and lows of the School Dinners project, and the Feed Me Better campaign.

And I DO blame their parents actually. It's not kindness to fill your children up with crap.

Doesn't surprise me www, depresses me, but I'm not surprised at all.

The next statemnt will possibly get me lynched but what the hell.

Kids can be vile, especialy when they get into 'pack mentality' mode.

You should see them have a go at kids who want to work in school. makes me seathe.

Don't we all care for our kids, HMB? Those parents who don't are in a tiny minority.

Maybe it would be easier if we all had little badges saying "caring parent", then it would relieve us of public displays via lunchboxes, choice of school, number of afterschool activities, brand of shoes etc.

Ameriscot, I think that everyone who posts on mumsnet cares. That is self evident, they go out of their way to post about their kids.

I teach in a school where children come to school unwashed in clothes that smell. I teach children who cannot be diciplined in any way as their parents will eithre a, beat up the child or b storm into the school f ing and blinding.

I have lost count of the number of children I see eating their breakfast of a can of coke and a mars bar.

We had a parents evening for year 8 last week. 38% of parent attended. Granted some that some had good reason, but many, and almost all of the parents that I needed to talk to, didn't give a shit.

Oh and the children who's head writhe with lice that are never combed out, the classes where yo have to open widows because some children smell so bad.

We care, sure, but not every parent. I deal with their kids every day

And as I always post, I teach in a good school, oversubscribed.

But I still remember the mother who couldn't fetch her sick child from school because she was to drunk at 11 in the morning

alux, whilst I agree with many of the recent posters that food alone isn?t the only factor, many packed lunches can be worse than the school dinners etc. etc. I think you do have a valid point in there.
If children eat food laced with empty calories and potentially behaviour altering additives then it is going to affect their state of mind, therefore their behaviour and ultimately their personal achievement. It is so simple and very disgraceful that the government isn?t enforcing better food standards in schools.

When I taught we did a small study of our year group (I think they were in year 8 then) concerning the supplying of brightly coloured cheap and nasty drinks in the canteen (particularly the blue one...). We asked our children to keep a food diary for several weeks and comparing a sample of those of children who were behaving in the morning and getting into trouble in the afternoon compared to a sample of those who were fine all day. The evidence was compelling enough for us to insist that the canteen ban these awful drinks and stock fuit juices or bottled water (which interestingly became the next trendy drink to have).

You can't say that kids who have coke for breakfast at school necessarily have bad parents. Kids can do things in spite of the best parental efforts. It may be that the parents have to leave early for work so are unable to supervise a proper breakfast...

And you can't really equate poor parenting skills with lack of caring. Life's just a bit more complicated than that.

I DO think Coke for breakfast = bad parenting actually. No, I don't think the odd can of Coke is the devil's work but I do think that consistently giving this to small children instead of nutritious food that helps them grow and keep them healthy is disgraceful and yep, bad parenting IMO.

Even if the parent has no control over it? At what point do you let your children make their own choices?

As Christopher Green says in Toddler Taming (I'm paraphrasing) "so little Johnny has the keys to the car and the money to go to the supermarket does he?" Parents do, for the most part, have control over the food their children eat. And they certainly do at home, they buy it! My son can make choices about what he eats depending on what we have in the house (which is all pretty much healthy food) or he can ask me to buy something else but if he asks for Coke, fruit winders, cakes with hydrogentated veg oil in them, or other crap the answer is no, I won't buy it. He can eat crap if he wants to when he does the supermarket shopping himself but I sincerely hope I'll have taught him enough about food and nutrition and cookery that he makes good choices on the whole and stays healthy. He might then go on to eat crap for 10 years or more but at least I'll know I did my best to give him a good start. And childhood is nutritionally an important time.

It's different for teenagers, WWW. You can control what a toddler gets, but as soon as your child is out of the house, you lose some of that control.

I figure that I control 75% of my kids' intake, and their schools the other 25%. As they get older, the child takes on some of the responsibility for what they eat - and rightly so. The only way you can continue to control them at this stage is to not give them any money. Even with a packed lunch, kids love to trade...so there's no guaranteed that the taste of a fruit rollup, or whatever, it's called will not cross your child's lips.

I think it is easier to worry about what your child does eat rather than what they don't. A good breakfast and dinner at home will more than make up for their nutritional transgressions at school.

I take it then, Ameriscot that you agree with me that parents who send their children into school filthy are showing bad parenting?

I realise that care and skill are two different things. The father who will beat his child for misbehaviour (and his wife is in a safe house due to his violence) paradoxically 'cares' for his child. It is just a shame that he is a violent bully. But to say that mosr parents 'care' is a gross simplification as well.

Most parents may well 'care' enough to keep their kids on the right side of social services. But I would estimate that about 10% of the children that I teach are suffering (in terms of their emotional and physical well being) from the parenting that they are getting.

I am teaching children of 14 who are incapable of any sort of age normal interaction with their peers. The are constatly demanding attention, in the same way you would expect from an 7-8 year old. They want to show you the pictures that the painted at lunch time. The simple reason is that they have never been spoken to in a resonable way at home or had anyone take notice of them.

Before I went into teaching I thought that most parents were 'good enough'. that is all we need after all. But trust me, standards of parenting are not what I thought they were.

An example from a cover lesson I had today, a boy shouting across the classroom 'X like the taste of cum in his mouth'. His parents 'care' too, not.

And while I agree with the benefits of a good breakfast Ameriscot, these kids are the ones who habitualy breakfast on coke and a mars bar, then tuck into a plate of crap for lunch and go home to , presumably more processed crap. I wish it wasn't so, but it is.

One benefit, we have banned 'blue pop'. Wow!

Is this not an example though of parents not knowing how to parent? We've lost the extended family parenting together that other cultures still have. Many parents today only have their own parents' skills to call upon and, if those skills were pretty awful to start with, it's not surprising that bad habits are perpetuated.

It must be depressing to be faced with children being brought up to the lowest possible specification.

Oh, I agree 100%! I'm not sugesting that these people are all bad or wicked and need sterilising! I've never read That Newspaper! I just think that they are crap at parenting and need help!

And on eof the worst offenders are the modertly well off who mistake generosity with material things for good parenting. The parents who want to be their kids 'best mate'. Fuck that! We are more important than that!

Better go and spend some time with my cherubs now

Jamie's School Dinners being repeated next week!!!!

For those of you who didn't see any or all of Jamie's school dinners on ch 4, the lovely guys are repeating all 4 episodes next week.

Mon - Thurs 11.05pm Channel 4.

So no excuse for not seeing it now!!!

HMB - or the moderately, and not so moderately well off parents who take umbrage to any spot of self discipline a teacher may attempt to teach their dear precious. From the lying little letters to get them out of detentions to invading the classroom to show the teacher who's boss.

No teacher, only him/her is capable of doing that.