To think that a busy life is no excuse for not giving your child breakfast?

[exBrightonBell]

Just watched the BBC news about a school which will be giving all its pupils a free breakfast. Amongst the reasons for children not being given breakfast at home was having a busy life. They interviewed a mum who said that their mornings were too late and busy to reliably give the children breakfast, and that she didn't have time to have an argument about it. She seemed to think that this was completely reasonable. AIBU to think that this isn't a reasonable excuse? Poverty and neglect are both reasons why children don't get breakfast at home, but parents being too busy? Really?

In the deepest darkest winter, I have one child who likes to sleep and sleep. He likes to sleep until 8am (having gone to bed at 7pm) and I need to leave for work at 8am.
Everything has been set out the night before, I often get up at 6am, but sometimes it just doesn't work out...
So, a banana in the car it is then.

Oh and I'm nowhere near Scotland, so that price is relevant for south-west England.

Or do some people really think that everyone else isn't going to see right through their pathetic excuses, and know that they're just lazy, feckless parents who can't be bothered to get a grip and get their morning routine sorted.

So do we just let children go hungry, now that we are aware that this will affect their outcomes?

A child not eating is easy to hide, this is probably the easist and cheapest way to answer this problem.

I have discovered the Tesco delivery charge for £3.50. Much cheaper than a minicab.

A banana in the car / in the child's bag, is fine.

I don't see how you can say you can't afford bread and milk for breakfast.I mean feeding your children is a fundamental, what item of excpenditure would be higher up your list of priorities?

Okay, I live in a place where food is hard to access and more expensive because of the transport costs involved.

So here is what you do: you plan for more of your budget to go on food. Not feeding your child adequately: not an option. I'd gladly go without food before not feeding my children.

Yes and Asda do delivery for £3.00... so the savings you would make by buying value range food rather thanpaying local shop prices would more than cover the delivery charge. Bread and milk both freeze.

The nearest shop after the rip off one is a 15 minute walk

Nothing really is it, 15 minutes!!

'A banana in the car / in the child's bag, is fine. '

it isn't really -its onlu about 100 calories. If that is all they have between supper at say 7pm the day before and lunch at 12 or 12.30

My DD(12) has breakfast at school because she has to leave the house at 7:15 to catch a bus. She has breakfast available at home, or various brioche/toast/fruit on bus options, but prefers to get a bacon roll or sausage or egg at school. (The bus generally arrives 30 minutes before the start of school and she does pay for the food.) She's not a great eater, and although she did eat breakfast at home all through primary school, it was great that the last one she was at offered toast at 20p a slice during morning break, and great that she would eat it. Much better than a piece of mangy fruit that was turned down at previous schools (I can get her to eat fresh fruit at home.)

Shayshaysmum, another poster has already confirmed that it's £1 for 4 pints in Lidl all over the country....

YANBU

We both have to get ready for work but still sit down for breakfast with the DCs. Takes 15-20 mins which is a long time but it's nice and means they get a good start to the day.

Banana, piece of toast, hot chocolate, milk, juice ...

It's a breakfast.

DD1 did not like to eat in the mornings. It did make her sick. So we worked and worked, she was dyspraxic and a super taster, on a compromise: she had a smoothie for 'breakfast' or she'd go for my oat biscuits and have a good snack at snacktime at 10PM.

But nothing at all? Nope. I was unbelievably loose with her but this was not negotiable.

Again, it's a long way from a decent food shop here, which is a small Co-Op, the weather is often terrible, the public transport dire and expensive, no big supermarket chains, blah blah blah. Is this an excuse not to do the best you can to feed your children? No, it isn't. Nor is 'too busy', plenty of FT working lone parents and dual-couple FT working parents/shift-workers, etc, manage it.

And we're not talking about a breakfast club, either.

Interesting to see the opinions on eating breakfast.

I have been 'forcing' ds to have something (or bribing him with something yummy) .

In the holidays I offered breakfast when they woke, if they didn't want it then I said to tell me when they did. Ds routinely went through until 10 and once or twice 11.30 and had an early lunch.

I was wondering if I should let him skip breajfast before school. He isn't allowed to take in snacks for break it anything. He is given the government free fruit (I think in the morning?)

'I can imagine then there are people on benefits who have it delayed/messed up who end up in this situation.'

It's temp situation when your benefits have been messed up. Been there, bought the tshirt. No food banks round here, either. What's a higher priority, really, than food for your kids? Tell me, because we've been through: rent and council tax arrears, unintentional homelessness, depression, redundancy, working poverty, extreme disability/child death, swapping shifts with each other to make ends meet and debt. I'll stop there.

Sorry Shayshays I totally misread your post! I thought you were saying the price was only for Scotland, but it was you saying it was for the entire country! Ooops.

Apparently they do free breakfasts for primary school children in Wales too. They have done since 2004, at a cost of £12.7million a year!. That is a lot of frigging money.

I don't understand why people can't give their DC some breakfast. My DC like crumpets so I buy value ones, they are about 39p and they have them with butter on. Sometimes they have Value pancakes, they are 29p a packet. Most days it's toast or cereal. When DH goes to work early, around 5.30 we put porridge in the slow cooker over night and he and DS1 have that. All they have to do is put it in the bowl.

I think as a social experiment it will be interesting, though, to see if it helps the children's concentration and enjoyment at school. (I hope they feed the teachers and staff, too.)

But I wonder how the funders will differentiate between the children whose parents are too busy, too poor, too alienated from affordable shops, and just lazy-arses, in order to be able to drive future social policy in the right direction.

Ditto with dental health, mentioned upthread. ^^

Breakfast at school would suit my DC down to the ground. Not because I CBA, but because by nature they both need to be awake for at least an hour (preferably two) before they can face breakfast. That would mean getting up horribly early, so I do force encourage them to eat breakfast, but it would be a lot easier a bit later.

Fortunately both get snacks at morning break anyway.

Having spent some time living in a deprived neighbourhood and been equally poor myself I do know that amongst some of my neighbours, some parents would use their situation quite 'shamelessly' to extract as much free stuff as possible from anybody that would give it. If they knew their kids would get a free breakfast if they said they couldn't afford it then they would say it and they would train their kids to say it too. Very, very few of these were indeed so ignorant (inc the druggies and alkies) not to actually know that their kids needed breakfast..but if someone else would give it, then they would say the right things to get it. As well as this, various professionals including schools tend to assume that because you are poor in a deprived neighbourhood that you are this stupid and 'chaotic' as the starting point. It becomes a self-perpetuating situation...really it does.