To be miffed about ds getting 'told off' for the content of his packed lunch

[Squiffie]

DS had a packed lunch consisting of:

A chicken wrap
Banana
Grapes
Rice pudding
A bottle of very dilute squash

In addition to this he had 3 or 4 jelly sweets that I'd popped in with his grapes as a treat, for which he got 'told off' by a member of lunchtime staff. Am I seriously not allowed to choose the contents of his lunch box?!

Ffs, grapes are bad now too?! Get a grip.

For dinner he had spaghetti bolognese followed by apple slices for 'pudding' so over the day he had a pretty well balanced diet!

I think it's better then some lunches but not brilliant to be honest.

Diluted squash - sugar or chemicals
Grapes - high sugar hit
Banana - sugar (is high GI)
Sweets - high sugar hit
Rice pudding - more sugar
Wrap - wheat. Possibly white.

Grapes,a banana & 3 or 4 sweets = too much sugar. Banana should be eaten as a part of breakfast, grapes part of lunch & sweets after school as a treat. Kids only need two portions of fruit per day & they should be eaten spread apart in the day.

I take it your dd is very active & slender despite eating excess sugar? Otherwise the excess will convert into fat. Is the school concerned about her weight?

Haha some people on this threat think they are nutritionists.

Vivienne, tbh, the contents of lunchboxes (well, the food the child eats generally) is a BIG thing, especially in primary, because it has such a massive impact on a child's ability to learn in the afternoon.

The behaviour of a child in my class, for example, completely transformed this wek after I made him eat the main part of his lunch every day, not just the crisps and cereal bar.

In my old class - slightly younger - I could pick out at 1.30 pm who had had a decent balanced lunch and who had not, and that tended to set the pattern for the afternoon...

& the rice pudding sounds a bit ott. The lunch sounds too much tbh. I eat much less than that for lunch & I'm 6ft tall, slender & bfing my large 18 month old.

*thread

tombliboouun my son is very active and eats lots of fruit and veg throughout the day and I don't plan on limiting it.

Parents that do send their children with only junk food are more likely to receptive to the conversation if you're not telling them they can't send any treats at all, but need to balance it with other food

Just look at some of the replies on this thread though, Midnite and you can see how resistant some parents might be. Plenty of children would eat their cake, crisps and/or chocolate bar and leave the sandwich.

How do you know it's 'too much' you don't know the portion sizes I gave him! Fun size or full size banana, bunch of grapes or half a dozen?!

If he's not hungry he won't eat it but as he often tells me:

''You don't know how hungry I am, only I know if I'm hungry or not''

Must've been a typo. Good on you your ds is very active. So I guess he plays sport, walks to & or from school & walks/plays outdoors a lot on week ends too. Sometimes it feels as though I'm the only parent who walks everywhere with the dc. So I guess there are parents out there who do the same. Nice to know that. However, too much fruit is not a good thing.. Ideally there should be twice as much veg in the diet as fruit.

True Squiffie, but with the sweets, where does/can schools draw the line? Your dd may be healthy, active &slim, but plenty of kids are just the opposite. Statistically 1 in 4 kids in the UK are morbidly obese!

We walk to and from school, ds probably does twice the distance some days as he runs ahead despite my repeated requests to walk next to me then runs back to me and repeats several times! He plays football after school once a week and both dc's swim twice a week! When they're not out and about they're on the trampoline which I hate standing outside freezing my ass off to supervise so I'm pretty confident he's burning off what goes in!

What I have learnt from the BBC documentaries is that:

• sugar is not really the problem, generations have been eating sugar without too much of a problem

• artificial sweeteners are a problem as they induce a craving for extreme sweetness

• combining certain fats with sugar and sweeteners is really bad as they create strong cravings and stop signals that you have had enough so you overeat

• food producers hide sugar combined with artificial sweeteners and fats in many many foods where they are not necessary and this may be because you start then craving those foods.

So if these scientists are correct then the food police is totally on the wrong track. Kids should be eating a balanced diet and no artificial crap.

As I said before I just wasn't aware of any policy and was miffed at ds feeling like he'd been in trouble!

Plus total nonsense to think that you cannot give a child a banana as a snack. It is a hell of a lot better that value yogurt sweetened with glucose fructose syrup ...

Proper food is good for people, it is all the artificial stuff I would be careful with.

I don't think it matters what size the banana or grape portions were.

My personal view is that when you start limiting fruit because of the natural sugars in it, then it's time to slap yourself repeated in the face with a fish slice.

I agree. If your dd's lunch is/was that much of a problem they shouldn't have moaned at him about it but rather send a note home or something. They probably don't get the full picture of his diet/exercise/lifestyle anyway as obviously you are happy with his general health & habits.

Yeah maybe the staff who brought him up on the contents of his lunch box are unreasonable as its none of their business but do you really put jelly sweets in your kids lunch? Because that is poor, poor lunchbox assembly. Also, who will pay for children's cavity treatment?

NeverGetTheBestOfMe IMO the whole argument that you have to live according to the dictat of the head otherwise you wont cope with the world of work has no factual basis.

Every year young men and women join the uniformed services and adapt to the uniform pretty much within minutes of starting basic training. It isnt necessary to wear ill-fitting poor quality polyester for 11 years to achieve this.

The school has no information and not dietetic qualifications to assess whether or not my DCs have a balanced diet. It is none of their business.

We have a Hobson's choice of one bottom 20 in England school. There is no other choice for us. I dont give two hoots what the head's opinions are on what my DCs wear and eat at school. When he can run the school better rather than into the ground then I will pay attention to him.

I told DS to say to any busybody 'I don't make my lunchbox'

I won't be dictated to until they stop making EVERY hot lunch include a cake/biscuit/pudding.

My son's lunch is way healthier than the school lunch, any day of the week!

Worry why does a child need sweets in their lunch box?

What, actually, is the problem with the 'no sweets' rule?

This is the third time I've asked this on this thread and no-one has answered it.

Are you an authority on the subject Tombliboouun? I've a school Mum friend who is a Dietician at a city hospital and will give her toddler pretty much 'a bit' of everything. She is extremely healthy and slim. Her children are very slight. Pretty much everyone walks to and from my DS's school. I give my DS half a sandwich when I meet him from school, our school run is nearly 4 miles to and from school in total. Sometimes he has a banana as well. He is a rack of ribs - I have to feed him more than 3 meals a day or he would literally waste away. He has a very high metobolic rate. Grapes outside of meal times are not going to make my DS obese any time soon.

I think its a relief to have a NO Sweets rule; saves an argument, builds in a break for those teeth. Also when I taught at a large inner London comp. we would all be dreading the afternoon sessions after the pupils had got into the vending machines or picked up something 'blue' from the drinks machine - high as kites.