aibu to think the school can get fucked telling me what i can and can't put in packups

[InTheWhiteRoom]

ds is 8

he came home with a letter saying his pack up today was inappropriate. it was a very patronising letter "we promote healthy eating" and all that shit.... i can only assume this is because as I put a marshmallow in his pack up. a SINGLE marshmallow. along with his sandwich (cheese salad on granary) 2 bits of fruit and a yoghurt.

aibu to think I am the parent and I decide what goes in lunches?

jeez anyone would think his pack up was a can of coke and a packet of biscuits.

Are crisps allowed? They're not exactly healthy are they? What about fruit juice, that's full of sugar isn't it? Where do they draw the line?
OP the lunch you made him sounds healthier than anything I was ever served at school, or anything I got sent to school with! I think they are being a bit OTT.

Sweets (Skittles/lollies) are sweets. Chocolate is chocolate. Both are confectionary.

If you are thinking of industry definitions, certainly. But in laymans terms, or in terms of health advice, or school lunch rulings, I think most people would consider any confectionary or candy, or chocolate coated biscuits, a sweet, and if sweets were banned, these items would not be allowed based on that technicality.

The water bottle we have to send in everyday is a farce.
My DD will oddly happily drink water at home from a glass. She insists it tastes 'different' from a drinking bottle (have tried various types but she insists it still tastes odd). I used to sneak half a cm of cordial in with her water - at least I could guarantee it would then be drunk.
Then another little girl told my DD she was being naughty having cordial - result being that my DD goes without a drink most of the day as she doesn't want to disobey school rules.

Does this help.....

www.express.co.uk/news/uk/83457/3-5m-victory-over-the-VAT-cake

YANBU - the Taxman was though...I mean ffs cost us all £3.5m

Our school specifies no sweets and no chocolate amongst other things. Some I agree with, some I don't but I pretty much stick to the rules.

The only bending is when I send a bit of homemade banana or vanilla and chocolate marble cake in. It's probably not allowed because chocolate is verboten but I send a bit that's mostly banana/vanilla and hope for the best as I'm sure a tablespoon of cocoa powder isn't as terrible as the fat and sugar effort that mostly passes for chocolate. And I'm fairly certain nobody's going to be jealous of that as a play date turned his nose up at it today

A marshmallow? You, madam, are worse that Hitler.

Tell them not to be so bloody impertinent. My child eats what I decide my child will eat.

I think ds would like to go to some of those schools that offer chips/burgers etc.

Our primary offers home cooked meals. Spag Bol, mid week roast, curries, mince and dumplings, chicken and veg pie - you get the idea. All cooked on site and served with two portions of veg. If child doesn't like what's on offer that day they may have a jacket potato with cheese/beans/coleslaw and salad.

Dessert is fruit, carrot and apple muffin, fruity flapjack etc with milk.

My daughter's school confiscated plain, air popped corn and a sugar free carton of rice milk, because it had cocoa in. Other children were tucking into muller chocolate corners - which were ok as they were yoghurts! A lot of these policies are ridiculous. However, I think some guidelines are ok, no takeaways for example.

Schools are under a huge amount of pressure to conform to government set expectations for children's food at school. The guidance for packed lunches is different from school dinners because school dinners are considered to be the main meal of the day for children, whereas packed lunch children are expected to have a cooked main meal at
home in the evening. There are inconsistencies, but schools are generally trying their best with the bureaucracy imposed on them. It would be nice if parents recognised that schools are not trying to piss them off. If you have a major issue, take it up with the department for education instead of battering an already pretty powerless individual school.

i don't understand why it is so hard to just not give sweets. kids don't need sweets in school. yes its just one marshmallow but if they allow it for you the kid who brings in the mars bar will say but that kid had a marshmallow. its easier to ban them all than trying to quantify what they mean by no sweets.

whats wrong with saving the treats for at home? my dd's school give them a packed lunch. we were allowed to supplement it until some parents kept sending in coco pop bards and diluted orange drinks and not understanding why those weren't part of the healthy eating plan. they get water to drink, a sandwich wrap or roll, yoghurt, a piece of fruit and carrot sticks. ive had no problem with this in the last four years

*"tbh I never did like stupid rules and never adhered to them and never will"

Oh God, how boring. One of them. *

I'm astonished at so many on here saying they think the OP is bringing her children up to be "rule-breakers" and that's a bad thing.

Silly rules are indeed made to be broken, at the very least, questioned and laughed at. I agree with those who say tell the school it was one marshmallow and they should get over it!

A couple of years ago our primary school sent out a letter saying they were going to check the lunch boxes and will confiscate unsuitable lunches and send letters to parents telling them where they have gone wrong with providing unhealthy lunches.

They must have had a load of complaints, as a week later they said following feedback from parents they would not be doing this.

My dcs school have never ever imposed any rules on pack ups.
We get away with all sorts. It's probably my dcs least healthy meal of the day, comparatively speaking.

It's interesting though that the obesity rate at the school is nil and we live in a very outdoorsy place. If there were an issue, I wonder if things would change.

'Tell them not to be so bloody impertinent. My child eats what I decide my child will eat.'

You could try that tack Tobyjugg, but I'm afraid they're entirely within their rights confiscating items that aren't permitted. You can then collect them later & your child can eat them during the bit of the day when he/she is under your supervision.

Another one for the staffroom noticeboard...accusations of impertinence are generally good for a giggle .

My dds school says no sweets/ chocolate or fizzy drinks which is fair enough but they don't seem to mind chocolate biscuits but they do have a problem with yogurt coated raisins and fruit rolls! It doesn't seem to make much sense to me.

We also got a letter home the other day saying that children are not allowed to eat baked beans more than once a week my dd reckons they are worried about too much gas.

Our school tried this once, so the parents got together and annotated a school meals menu to point out that every single thing the school wanted to ban was available in their own food.
That was the end of that.
Have you tried pointing out that marshmallows are fat free OP?

The term you are all looking for is bait. Taken in a bait box. I cannat wait for me bait....

DS1's school did this a few years ago and actually dared to hand out the offending items at sometime in a little clear bag to each parent who broke the rules. We would stand about laughing like drains at the parents doing the walk of shame with a plastic bag of mini jaffa cakes. How dare you foist your delicious orangey cakes onto our offspring?

Madness. Children's lunch boxes are, on the whole, better than ever before. Why? Because we're all so clued-up on nutrition. If school has time and energy to waste on this, they need to reassess where they could be re-focussing that to benefit the children.

We are turning into a nation of bloody sheep. What happened to free thought and challenging petty jobsworths?

I don't give up parental responsibility when my child crosses the school threshold, so I will decide what goes in the lunchbox.

As for the arguments that ifbyou choose to send a child to a specific school, you must obey the rules - I'd love to know where all this choice of schools exists. There's one primary in my home town. In my nearest larger town, the council closed a lot of schools to make one big school.

My DD is only 4 months old so I haven't encountered this particular strain of lunacy yet, but.... confiscated lunch items?

Obviously no hardship to the OP's DS who had one marshmallow confiscated from an otherwise healthy lunch, but what do they do with children who have genuinely unhealthy lunches - confiscate the whole thing? And how does that work given that those children are more likely to have less than brilliant food outside school and therefore need their lunch? (Thinking of a child a friend taught 15 years ago whose entire lunch, every day, was a chocolate spread sandwich on white bread and several biscuits because that was apparently all he would eat.) The logical progression of that policy is that a child who is genuinely struggling for nutrients gets their lunch taken away.

I reckon they took her marshmallow because they fancied it for themselves - you should ask for it back and see what they say

ds2 is very small and skinny for his age (6) and has been seen a few times by the dietician to check that he's eating OK. He eats pretty well - but part of his problem is that he loves chopped salad veg and would happily munch his way through a cucumber a day if he was allowed to - which sounds great to some 'fat is bad' minded people - but actually it's not because it means he eats it at the expense of his protein and carbohydrate and fat, all of which he needs, to help him grow. Which means that he needs to be eating plenty of cake and custard and full fat yogurt and the like.

I've had to go and talk to school to make sure that not only do they not pull his stuff on the basis of it being a 'healthy school with healthy packed lunches' but that at the moment they're doing healthy eating and trotting out all the 'fat is bad' weight watchers style comments that aren't really appropriate for infant school age kids and certainly not for ds. arggh.

He also has the Boots vitamin teddy bears - a little packet of 5 'gummy bears' which look like haribo bears but are vitamin ones. He likes to have them at breakfast time (as you can imagine the 'I have sweets for my breakfast' comments went down really well at school!) but if he doesn't and we run out of time I often pop them into his lunch box as it's supposed to be better to eat them in the morning.

OP - the vitamin bears would be great for your ds's lunch box - because they'd try to take them from her and then you could ask why they were taking away her vitamin supplements, if you wanted to engineer a conversation with them about this

It's fecking ridiculous OP. I am amazed people are so sheeplike about these rules.

Our school tried this once, so the parents got together and annotated a school meals menu to point out that every single thing the school wanted to ban was available in their own food

That is the way forward. Petty interfering jobsworths need to be pulled up short and not allowed to continue with their madness.

I have to say Id rather teachers focus on teaching ( which I know is wider than just the curriculum) than being the lunch box police

Yes, I suspect the teachers feel that way too.