To feel like force feding the anorexic school teacher whose imposing a ban on cereal barres in packed lunches?

[onthewarpath]

Being all in favour of healthy balanced eating, I nevertheless find myself fighting with school every day since they have imposed a ban of cereal barres in packed lunches. So while school lunch children are scoffing down chocolate mousse for desert my children are supposed to be eating celery and carrot sticks?????
I always prided myself in giving a reasonably balanced, mostly home made, content in lunch boxes. In fact, If I was taking any thing from it I would probably be done by NSPCC for under nurishing my children.
I am being told that it is because parents give piles of chocolate barres, fizzy drinks and crisps (all in the same meal of course!!!!!!)I have yet to meet one such parent as most of the ones I talk to seem to be quite clued up on what to give children in a lunche box. They even know about FRUITS believe it or not .
If really a child was comming to school with the most infamous lunch box, could the teachers not call the parents and give them sensible advice or is that not PC enough? why should everyone be painted with the same brush?

I like the spelling of bars though. Are they special ones for ballerinas?

Chocolatedot, yes, I buy the Organix ones for dd (taste horrible imo but she likes them!)

She is always hungry and needs something to fill her up - I think it's very unlikely that she'd eat extra sandwiches though.

I'm beginning to wonder what on earth I could put in her lunchbox if muesli bars, yoghurts and biscuits were banned (all high in sugar)

ditto. political correctness gone berserk again, bit like the cereal bar issue.

i also agree that such extreme focus on food encourages an extremely unhealthy attitude and can certainly be linked to eating disorders.

i imagine that this was what the op was trying to convey in her title.

i remember the joys of lunch as a child and the particular treat of a choocolate biscuit on the proviso that you ate your apple.

always munched my way through it so as to get my treat.

a spoonful of sugar and all that??

lets not forget that eating is meant ot be a pleasure and not a chore.

DD takes cereal bars most days - no added sugar, just oats, fruit, and a bit of sunflower oil (just rechecked packet).

How's that 'unhealthy'?

Anyway, I could fill my children's lunchboxes with all sorts of über-healthy food - which would come home completely untouched. And frankly, doing a whole school day on no food (which is what would happen) is far more unhealthy than a balanced lunch of a (white bread) sandwich with a small helping of salad and then a choc bic or cereal bar or yoghurt. Extremes tend to be unhealthy. Balance tends to be healthier. Some teachers are a bit young and haven't learnt this yet. They just need educating

Open the packet, take out the bar, chop it up into chunks and put them on some lettuce leaves - call them croutons and be done with it!

The anorexic and force feeding was just a figure of speech and we all knew what she meant. I can see another thread where someone suggests wiring the keyboard to the mains electric. I'm sure no one thought that was meant to be serious

Maybe it's not the teachers fault (or maybe it is and she is taking guidelines too far) but the policy these days seems to start from the premise that eating is evil and should be discouraged or minimalised at all costs. The policy makers sound like people with eating disorders.

Agree with that, onager.

What happened to enjoying good food?

Don't primary teachers have better things to do than worry about whether so and so has a - SHOCK - cereal bar on their person?! They want to try teaching in a secondary where it's not unknown for drugs and weapons to be brought onto the premises.

Sorry - bit over the top but I get narked with all the petty rule making that seems to go in primaries.

No I'm sure it wasn't meant to be serious Onager but it still somehow offended me. Being anorexic isn't something you choose, it happens to you and knowing people were laughing at me when I had it really didn't help. It is ignorant. You wouldn't make a funny comment about someone who had cancer so why do it with anorexia?

i'll leave it now as it ain't worth getting worked up about, but I don't think it's really defensible.

Decisions like this are never made by individual teachers, so the whole "force feed the teacher" line is ridiculous anyway. This will have been a school decision.

Some cereals are bad and some are not so bad - and I do think banning them is silly - but please don't blame, or insult the teacher for this.

Cereal bars are full of sugar and hydrogenated fats/ palm oil and of little nutritional value. Unless your child has serious medical issues with "healthy eating" policy, just get on with it.

My kids take a sandwich (ham/ cheese/ salami) or pasta salad, piece of fruit and home made bun/ flapjack & water to drink. So does everyone else at their school. The kids all eat it & there are only a small number who are visibly overweight compared to the higher number at neighbouring private school (ie not a class issue)

Why does everyone get so caught up by healthy eating policies? Crap, processed food is bad for you & children are especially vulnerable to marketing etc of these products. And eating rubbish at an early age will have detrimental effects etc etc... Presumably years ago some parents were distressed at not being allowed smoke on school premises?

oh yeah. Force feed someone who has anorexia.
Great comment there.

Some cereal bars might be high in sugar and have bad fats in them, but not all.

Some are not so different to a homemade flapjack.

What sort of homemade buns do you make?

I'm still a bit at the poster who apparently expected the dinner staff to make sure her child ate their apple before their chocolate biscuit, as she does at home.
Try doing that with 200 children - afternoon school would be cancelled....

I'm with you pofaced I wish that schools round here would ban crap foods from lunch boxes tbh.
Most of the kids where I work bring ridiculous things for lunch and it would stop DD moaning about what her friends are allowed and she's not.
In friends kids school they said just one treat item eg choc biscuit, cake, mousse, so parents started adding chocolatey cereal bars and passing them off as healthy snacks as well as treat item- school banned all cereal bars. Is this what has happened at your school onthewarpath?

Message withdrawn

Homemade buns? flour, eggs, sugar, butter, vanilla essence. No transfats. No preservatives. no artificial colouring/ flavouring.

Flapjacks? oats, sugar, butter. no transfats, no artificial preservatives etc etc

These are perfectly acceptable "treats" because they are made from straightforward ingredients that the human body can digest.. unlike eg transfats which go rancid (!)

To object to homemade flapjacks because they are have loads of sugar and say they are the same as cereal bars is plain wrong - it's like equating porridge with sugar sprinkled on top to Oat Cheerios.

Anyway: i've seen the evidence with my own eyes in my own family when you cut out processed foods: slimmer, healthier, more energetic children and adults and lower household bills and greater variety in our diet...

An orange has a lot of sugar and fruit juice.

YANBU at all.

The lunchbox police at school are starting to do my head in. I do feel your pain.
It's not just the dinner ladies confiscating chocolate off people, it's the incessant, extreme message about so-called healthy eating that the children are subjected to. "Balance" as a concept appears to have gone out of the window. The message that seems to be getting through at DD's school is that only fruit and veg is worth eating, with even a small amount of butter or chocolate being punishable by gastric band surgery at 14. DD started going to a cookery club this term, but has lost interest already because everything has to be low-fat, low-sugar, no-fun and no-flavour. There's only so many times you can teach children to prepare a bloody pasta salad!

YANBU to think the school is overreacting. YAB a bit U in your choice of words.

Horrible thread title.

Po, I used to suffer from eating disorders and do not object to your thread title one bit.

Notsoteenagemum - your dd's school seems to have the right idea by suggesting one 'treat' item. Unfortunately you can't make people follow suggestions, however healthy and sensible they are - as Jamie appears to be finding out in Rotherham.

I have been faced with the 'X,Y or Z is allowed to do such-and-such/eat such-and-such/stay up 'til midnight/watch 18 rated movies' argument, more times than I care to remember, and my answer is that I am not X, Y or Z's mum, we all make different rules and different parenting decisions, and I can't make other kids live by my rules, but that my children do have to live by my rules. It's not a perfect answer, but the alternative seemed to be to say that X, Y or Z's parents were wrong, and I didn't want my ds telling his friends that his mum thought that their parents were bad parents.

IMO, the school should butt out. As I said at length on another similar thread, I disagree totally that the school has any remit to dictate the contents of the packed lunch provided by the parent (with the exception of peanuts where there is a child with a known peanut allergy).

Am ignoring the anorexia bit as irrelevant.

I totally agree with the sentiments of the OP.

However, I am going to refrain from commenting further on her knee-jerk, frustrated choice of language.

This is because I got an absolute pasting on a very similar thread I started recently that, in my angry mood, included the words "Food Nazi". And my son has an eating disorder that I feel is being enabled by his school's mad lunchbox policy. Items such as home-made scones and flapjack are banned fgs! That is wholesome food, with much-needed calories for active 8 yr olds.

Political correctness gone bananas (both on this thread and generally in schools )