Aibu to not know why you wouldn't be able to feed your DC's breakfast?

[Bearlover16]

Daughters school has recently extended the 'paid' breakfast club to 'free' breakfast club due to an increase in the number of children going to school not having had any breakfast.

Are people really that much on the bread line that they cannot buy a loaf of bread or some cheap porridge oats for less than a quid?

I'm not well off by any means and I do donate to food banks when I can. I also ensure my dcs have had breakfast before leaving the house as I was always led to believe it's the most important meal of the day.

I have four kids.

Three of them would happily eat 8 bowls of cereal at 5am if I let them.

DD on the other hand can’t stomach it until mid to late morning. I used to expect her to try to eat breakfast when she was in primary. By secondary it wasn’t worth the battle.

So she goes to school with both a packed lunch and a smoothie and snack for her 10am break which she now treats as breakfast.

It’s better than the mid morning bacon sandwich she bought every day for the first two weeks of school because she decided she was hungry mid morning

undercoverbanana cry cry cry!

DS goes to breakfast club most days. He has breakfast at home but very early. So he has some toast just before class starts. It's social lots of the kids do it, having it open to everyone reduces the stigma of it too.
As we can afford it I buy a box of cereal or pots of jam every few weeks to take in.

Jonsnowswife it isn't all about you. Nothing you've posted has added anything to the conversation.

Yes I'm quite aware it isn't 'all about me' thankyou @bubblebubblepop. I will continue posting on whatever thread I bloody like until @MNHQ tells me otherwise

I suspect it does. We have good employment in this country and a wide range of benefits so no excuse to not feed their children. You'd think the would do everything to ensure there was food

I think many people seem to live in their own bubble. Not everyone lives the same life. Many people have constant obstacles to prevent them from leading a perfect life’.

Poverty, addiction, mental illness, circumstance, lack of education so many things contribute.

We need to stop judging and start helping and doing. Free breakfast clubs for all could be a start. It’s not just about the food but also about, interaction and getting to school early. It benefits those who need a decent breakfast, working families and all the kids who can get to school on time and can begin socialising.

As an aside my eldest DC literally wakes up hungry and devours cereal. My youngest hates ‘normal breakfast’ and would rather have leftovers from the night before. This morning it was lasagne

Im a single parent about to have my esa medical and im terrified i fail it as it means 6wks minimum with no money and i have a 2yo ds. I always make sure he has something for breakfast even if it means i dont as he needs the food more than i do

If it means kids getting fed in the morning, for whatever reason, it's no bad thing.

'We have good employment in this country'

Do we? Really? What have you that impression? Some people work two jobs and barely manage to get by.

Some people on this thread can't see past themselves it's quite sad to see.

Do you all think the likes of food banks are myths? Those saying it's quite easy to feed your family

@ItsNachoCheese , Good luck for your medical. Hope you get a sensible one!

"We have good employment in this country and a wide range of benefits" yellow what planet are you on?! There are 9.5 X more people unemployed than there are jobs, that doesn't mean full time well paid jobs either that's ANY job inc zero hours contracts or as little as 3/4 hours a week! Benefits system is in COLLAPSE at the moment, UC is a complete farce, as I said upthread people are DYING as a direct result of the policy changes. Even the tories have HAD to admit to several APPALLING cases.

"Free food now may help the child" do you SERIOUSLY begrudge a hungry child some bread? Are you Marie Antoinette????

Undercoverbanana that made me tear up what a beautiful story

Thank you jonsnowswife i can only hope it goes well

YellowMakesMeSmile - you are an ignorant idiot.

It’s crazy. I’ve always believed a child shouldn’t leave the house with out breakfast. There is no need, obv except for extreme poverty but even then you need to get help so your children can have food.

I’m a childminder and I don’t usually do breakfast but there’s so many parents who’s children ‘just won’t eat at that time of the morning’ but that’s roughly translated as ‘I can’t be bothered to get up earlier as they take 15 mins to eat’ obviously I do give the children brekkie because they’re lush but immediately will eat the full brekkie upon arrival because they will eat that early, parent just doesn’t want to make time for it in the morning. Lol. My eldest went to breakfast club because of work logistics but she always had breakfast with us at home.

Lots of comments judging parenting and saying people don't feed their kids because they can't be arsed, you have no idea what is going on behind closed doors.

My brother is a lecturer at an FE college, and they've had to set up a free breakfast for the students, as loads of teenagers were turning up hungry, having walked for an hour to get there as they couldn't afford public transport.

I stopped eating breakfast by 10/11 and only started again when I was pregnant 15 years later. I just wasn't hungry in the morning and eating used to make me feel sick, I remember thinking everything tasted like cardboard. So I don't think it's true that parents always use it as an excuse.

I can only hope that yellow is a troll. Feel free to come and tour South Wales and then tell me there are plenty of jobs and benefits available. It's a cycle of horrific poverty around here and as a primary school teacher my mum deals with awful safeguarding issues several times a day. If you're not made of strong stuff it would be very difficult to hear some of the stories told in valleys primary schools.

MissFlashpants

I worked at one that did that, staff also bought a box of pot noodles and brought clothes in for some kids.

Undercoverbanana

Not all heroes wear capes.

ItsNachoCheese

I've just had mine, no letter yet but the assessor was lovely and told me that I'm entitled to the benefit.

Now I'm waiting for my PIP assessment.

When you are raised in a chaotic household, this is the only template you have to move forward with. I volunteer with families, in many cases the love is in abundance but the structure on how to manage money, run a household and cook basic meals is not something they know. How can they? As children this isn't the set up they witnessed.

For some families, more money isn't the answer. Non judgemental support, learning some basic home economics and helping them to implement a routine helps. People don't want to live in chaos and disorder but when life keeps slapping you down it's hard to find the energy to move forward.

I think more children are not fed than we realise.

My teacher friend at her old school used to send children home with food every night and massive food parcels in the summer holidays.

My next door neighbours child yesterday was asking for food as soon as she saw me yesterday, then sent my daughter to ask if she could have dinner here, then when we went out asked for fruit. This was all between 4-7pm where the child hadn't been called in for dinner at all by her parents. In fact thinking about it I've never seen these children be called in for dinner or not be able to play out because it's dinner time.

Disability causes chaotic lives. It meant I had to quit my job to support my disabled child before he killed himself - he's ten by the way. That meant after my wages ran out I had to wait for benefits to be processed. I was entitled to carers allowance. Do you know how long it took to process? Three months. During that time, the child tax credits and DLA I was receiving was going on rent and council tax and barely anything else. Any money I had in the bank was gone and then I was borrowing Barclay's money. I was filling my shoes with cardboard because I had walked holes in the bottom and when it rained I was getting freezing cold and wet.

Because I didn't have money it was difficult to make sure there was always food in the fridge. There are no supermarkets where I live, only the Tesco metro type stores which are really expensive. My children struggle with food anyway. I could buy cereal and because of their disability might not be able to eat it. Same with cheap bread and toast. So often they would end up choosing something they could actually swallow from a shop on the way to school.

They still struggle with breakfast. They still sometimes find something in a shop on the way to school. I'm in huge amounts of debt because of the months it took to process a carers allowance claim. Shit like that has a way of snowballing out of control.

I'm a well educated person. I don't spend my money on me. I don't smoke, drink, take drugs, buy clothes, have a TV, have Sky, have any of the things I'm supposed to being a 'chaotic' person.

Money, disability, benefits, homelessness all create a perfect storm of shit, which can lead from one shit situation to another. The fact you manage to get out of the house in the morning makes no difference to another person's situation. Once we got out of our front door, through the communal area and down the street past all the sick that the crack smoker upstairs had chundered everywhere, no one felt like breakfast much anyhow.

And yes, we were running late on the way because the police had to wake us up to gain entry to the building to break up the endless punch ups from the upstairs flat meaning no one could go back to sleep for ages and felt like shit at 6.00am.

Pisses me off when people judge everyone else for doing their best with the solution being we could either put down our spliffs or get up 15 minutes earlier. Like fuck.

I used to be a primary school teacher (Y5) in quite a deprived part of Yorkshire. We used to do toast for the class every morning during the register because about 80% of the class weren't given breakfast at home. In some cases the parents didn't have much money at all but in most they just couldn't be arsed with their kids. Lots of them got themselves up and dressed and came to school in the morning while their parents were still in bed.

Good grief, you do love a bunfight, OP. I suggest you try a parking by the school gate thread next. Although pyjamas on the school run and eating on the train are also much-loved MN evergreens.

Those of you talking about bulk buying and own brand cereal- have you ever been to a corner shop on one of the poorer housing estates?

To get to the kind of shop that does that sort of thing, round here you'd have to spend £3.50 on bus fares first- so what would you use to pay the food with: your bus ticket?

It is precisely because I am not on the breadline that I can afford to live near the shop that sells economic food. And could afford to buy a ticket to another shop if I needed it. And oh yes, we can afford a car too. And I could afford to pay for food to be delivered.

And once the nice food arrives, I can cook it because I have my own kitchen (not living in a refuge), I have my own pots and pans (because I had the money to buy them) and I can afford the gas (because we are not on a metre).

It's nice to be comfortably off because you can afford to live so very cheaply. Poor people haven't got that option.

We eat relatively cheaply because we are in a position of immense privilege. I can afford to bulk buy and store. I have gadgets that make cooking easy. I can cook. I can try new foods/recipes knowing if it's disgusting there is emergency food in the cupboard. I can afford gas, buying at different places as I have a car.
My parents taught me to cook and encouraged me to develop skills in the kitchen.
Not everyone is that lucky.
But whether kids are missing breakfast due to financial or organisational reasons, they should still be fed.
On a purely selfish note, hungry or those eating poorly, are likely to be more disruptive or find it harder to learn, taking up more time. So if all the children are fed, classes will be better with behaviour and educational results will be improved.