To think the school has a point about packed lunches

[Rebeccaslicker]

I'm not sure about banning parents from the premises, but is it a bad thing to say no chocolate, sugary drinks etc in a primary school lunch?? (My DD is only 2, so I haven't had the lunchbox decisions yet, v interested in people's views!)

www.google.co.uk/amp/www.stokesentinel.co.uk/news/stoke-on-trent-news/now-mum-48-banned-school-1108690.amp

There's a big difference between being starved and not getting what's seen as a healthy diet though. How far do we accept our diet being policed? Will it apply outside school too? If someone feeds the kids beige food and too many biscuits are the social workers going to be on the case? As I say our school has quite sensible rules and they are fair for the hot meals and pack lunches so I'm not complaining but I don't want a nanny state. Looking out for kids being abused is one thing but I don't want it going too far.

Fancy someone having the audacity to say that a child should have a piece of fruit or vegetable with their lunch. It’s an outrage really.

Nobody tells me how to feed my child. Crazy lefties.......

fuckit

I don’t understand - which school has banned “some type of pudding” in packed lunches?

Suburban our school nurse met with DS2 and me, she suggested to me that he has a small cup of juice followed by a large cup of water at home, usually that's all he'll drink all day, if we're lucky he'll finish the water. At school he takes an Evian bottle which I've marked lines on so that he aims to drink to the next line. The goal is for him to drink a bottle and a half. At the moment he's drinking to the first line - maybe a quarter of the bottle. His teacher's reminding him every 5 minutes. I might talk to the school nurse about squash.

Perfectly we had to try similar with my DD. She would ignore all encouragement, if she took five sips in a day we were on a winner. Her teacher bless her heart tried all sorts. DD would come home & neck a bottle of squash!! The school eventually agreed that her drinking was the most important thing so now allow squash.

That sounds a good idea, perfectly.

I’ll be honest, I was surprised when the school nurse said weak squash is better than nothing. I thought they’d worry more about tooth decay. And I’m another one puzzled about what could possibly be objectionable about water as a drink - to me, it tastes of nothing.

But I’m not a health professional, so if that’s the advice, that’s what we do.

They've banned chocolate bars and flavoured water. So juice and a cake would be OK.
This is pretty standard in schools and there really is no need for children to be eating these things.

Where I live the schools leave parents to decide what their children will eat.

If they are worried about a child (and this usually extends to more than what's in their packed lunch) then they have school-based social workers and counselors to work with the parents and children.

They also encourage parents to come in at lunchtime and eat with their children, up to about the age of 8/9, which I used to do often.

They also don't waste any energy on school uniforms and focus instead on behaviour and achievement.

I think it helps that they don't have government-set targets to reach. They are instead accountable to the local population - we vote on what budget the school receives, including teaching pay and benefits, then set our own local council tax rates accordingly. We actually as a town choose to have fairly high tax rates, so that we can pay fairly high teacher salaries and afford extra services like social workers and counselors.

Our schools have quite rightly taken the view that it is actually none of their f*cking business what parents feed their own child.
We once had a dietician to speak to the parents forum and she said the single biggest problem she had seen with packed lunches were that they were not calorifiic enough.An active 8 yo needs 1800-2000 calories a day.How many kids breakfast and packed lunch together come to 1200 calories? Thjy are then ravenous after school and demanding snacks!

My children mercifully missed getting free school dinners. I always sent a packed lunch. I worked in the attached pre-school and can confidently say that the cooks in our kitchen could, with minimum effort, burn water.

I have never seen such utter slop passed off as food. Unset cheesecake that inexplicably tastes like antibiotics with smashed chunks of biscuit floating in it anyone?

It caused slight mutterings when I opted for packed lunches as a member of staff (I didn't mention the above). I don't rate school dinners as a whole...cheap ingredients and staff with minimum training don't make good food.

When the 'rules' were issued I asked the head if a small homemade cake would be acceptable. She laughed and said "of course, the parents we are targeting are the ones who send 2 big chocolate bars and a can of coke for their child's lunch." What's ridiculous is that you need to have a blanket rule that penalises everyone to reach the few...who seem to ignore it anyway.

I don't understand how you let them get to the stage of not drinking water

Because sometimes they just won’t. Our girl has pretty much refused to drink it. She does have a bottle next to her bed at night which some nights she will finish by morning, but ever since she was old enough to have an opinion she has pretty much refused to drink water. For four years at school every day she gets a water bottle but most days it comes home full. She has poo issues (compounded by not drinking enough) and has medication which works better with lots of fluids. We have tried every trick in the book to persuade her, she just doesn’t do it. She’s not a fan of squash and we don’t have fizzy drinks in the house often, so her drink of choice is fresh orange juice. This is not great for her teeth but we have to make sure she drinks plenty otherwise the tummy issues become horrendous and she will go an entire week with a full tummy. It’s a difficult balance to strike, but if you have any ideas how to get her to drink water, i’m happy to give them a go! Even just not letting her have anything else hasn’t worked.

Suburban maybe because I mentioned that my DC's school bans packed lunches, the catering company provides them for trips. I don't think they trust the parents. I feel slighted.

My dd is very specific and picky over food but only really wants healthy food, raw veg, fruit, clean meat (as she calls it) so I find it hard to argue with her but it rules school dinners out which is fine but sitting in a room full of other kids eating cakes, puddings and ice-cream everyday made her feel a bit singled out so I made her brownies for her lunchbox, not everyday maybe once a week and just a tiny piece, literally maybe 1 inch square, she was happy with that. The first few times I put a post-it note with it saying it was homemade, reduced sugar, had veg/fruit and cocoa powder etc rather than being a 'chocolate cake' school were perfectly happy with that (they probably enjoyed being able to laugh at another one of 'those' parents!)

A lot of obesity is actually caused by the slimming industry, which is a scam on the level of religions. (If you diet, you lose weight but then put back all the weight you lost, plus more. If you repeat the pattern, you end up much bigger than you would if you'd just stayed 'chubby' ie ignored the ridiculous pressure on people, particularly women, to hate themselves and develop disordered eating).

School dinners are allegedly better than they were a few decades ago, but they are still produced as cheaply as possible, and there is only so much anyone can do when it comes to providing big quantities of food quickly and cheaply. Add to that the fact that you can't force kids to eat something they dislike...

My school tend to use a bit of common sense. A child turning up with a cold happy meal and a can of monster every day might pose an issue but luckily they have decided most parents can be trusted to feed their own children.

What I saw at my DCs' primary school was that the kids bringing in the least healthy food often came from the most chaotic home lives. Leftover happy meal or a tube of Pringles might have been the only food in the house.

Ban XYZ or worse still take it off the children then they could be left with nothing.

The school had a very high FSM entitlement but a very low take-up.

This is s response from the lady in question.

What a pack of lies she only came up with the abuse claim after I went to the local paper. Nowhere have they mentioned that they forced our children to tip away juice or lose break time and continue to do so.

Meeting was cancelled and when I requested a new one I was up to now refused this. I did tell them I was joining another parent in their meeting this was when I received my ban.

Double standards here teacher eating cake and hiding it in tissue but the kids have clocked them. Sitting and guzzling juice in front of the kids saying rule don't apply to them.

In MY OPINION they want all parents to buy there school dinners but we have have a choice n we continue to pack OUR children's lunch boxes with what we feel. OUR children need to make it through the day.

Their metabolism works loads faster than ours so they need a certain amount of sugar and vitamins. Not all children like plain water and milk that has more sugar in it than a sugar free juice.

But these teachers are more than happy to Let OUR children go without a drink all day.

The fight continues
PARENTS RIGHT TO FIGHT WHEN CHILDREN CAN'T

Could be worse. My son has a rare condition and older kids with the same thing rely on very specific types of very sugary drinks when they're having a crisis. One by one these drinks are being changed to have less sugar so those options are rapidly disappearing, but many of the drinks they need are being banned from school premises, and they won't make an exception for medical reasons, even when it could save a trip to hospital. Seems to me like this is going way too far.

And if you have a child that will refuse to drink water until they're dehydrated, I'm not sure what you're supposed to do if you can't even send squash (my boys haven't ever had anything but milk and water, but I totally understand that some kids will refuse it). There's also the double standards issue obviously.

My friends daughter and her friends, are in the process of arranging to pick their children up from school at lunch time, to take them home for their lunch.

Their school insists on only having an halal certified menu, to cater for a dozen children, That is not acceptable to Christian children at all.

So 'cakes and fizzy drinks' are WAY down the list for crap school meals :(

Do children need sugar?

Energy from complex carbs I can def see, but sugar? Anyone medical have a proper view as to whether she's right or wrong?

Our schools have quite rightly taken the view that it is actually none of their fcking business what parents feed their own child.
We once had a dietician to speak to the parents forum and she said the single biggest problem she had seen with packed lunches were that they were not calorifiic enough.*
You might not think it is any of the schools business what we feed our children, but with the rise of childhood obesity, who should make it their business? The nhs to tackle the ever growing problem of over weight children who grow into overweight adults? Or would it be better to tackle the problem as it starts and try to deal with it in the children?

If children’s packed lunches aren’t calorific enough (I have no idea if they are or aren’t) why are all these children becoming overweight?
This is a massive issue and I do think schools have to play their part in helping to deal with it. I’ve seen primary aged children with their parents in the spa shop by school filling their lunch boxes with crisps, chocolate bars, a can of pop and nothing else. You can not think that is right?