Cake and biscuits daily on nursery menu - ten month old

[HateTheWait]

We've just taken our daughter out of nursery after just a couple of weeks - various problems but what started it all off was (she was ten months old when she started there) the menu that first week. The menu had breakfast, fruit snack, lunch, tea which all looked fine, varied etc but then after lunch every day there were puddings (precisely from Monday to Friday: fruit and ice-cream, pineapple upside down cake, banana and custard, chocolate sponge and fruit and yoghurt) and every single day, mid afternoon, they give biscuits (described by manageress as 'normal tea biscuits, from a packet'). We were really shocked that sugary foods like chocolate, cake, icecream and biscuits appeared on the menu so frequently....especially as she was under 12 months but we wouldn't be happy with her eating sugary things like that so often, even when she was older. We've not really given her any sweet things (ok a lick or so of icecream at the seaside, some stollen at Christmas, we are not anti cake crusaders or anything, and I bake muffins etc for her with natural sugars eg from bananas and dried fruit) at all yet....we wanted people's honest thoughts on this generally / is this really what a nursery menu looks like? The nursery wouldn't offer any substitutes for the pudding and after two weeks of arguing said they'd give a rice cake instead of a biscuit for afternoon snack but by then we'd lost all faith and already registered to a new nursery. Thanks!

[HateTheWait]

Thanks everyone, for taking the time to respond! The thing that shocked me the most from the above is the fact that nutritionists are recommending high sugar foods as fillers?! I think that's a cheap, deceitful way to get calories into a child and if we are teaching a child even aged 10 months (as my daughter was) that it's ok to fill up on cake, how can we be surprised when the same children end up in ill health as adults due to an unhealthy relationship with food?! At the end of the day there must be a better way to get calories and calcium into our kids. Avocados, full fat yoghurt, we add single cream to things like porridge and mashed potato to make it more calorific sometimes, adding cheese to baked beans, I butter both sides of my daughters toast, cream based sauces and curries, sometimes I add a bit of Philadelphia cream cheese to chille con carne or baked beans, raisins and grapes are high in natural sugar etc etc. We're lucky to have found a nursery (admittedly twice as far as the nursery we left but we'd rather travel out of our way and know our daughter is getting proper nutrition) who have a sensible idea of snacks like sandwiches and cheese and crackers and veg sticks and puddings are more often than not fruit, yoghurt etc. What I also noted from everyone's comments was the fact that many mums have commented to say they like the nursery so they are putting up with puddings etc because the nursery is good (luckily we didn't have that problem, our first nursery was not a good option for a whoooooole lot of reasons)....I was thinking of creating one of those petitions to the UK government to see if we can effect a change in law to prevent nurseries from having things like cake and biscuits on the regular menu (occasional times of course, cakes and biscuits are fine, after all, that is what balance is, you don't exclude foods, you just include all foods in the right portion, frequency and proportion)....if anyone is still reading this, is that something you would consider signing? Thoughts and opinions welcome! Thanks again!

[HSMMaCM]

I wouldn't sign because we already live in a nanny state. I do think childcare and school nurseries should be clear to parents. I make biscuits with the children - flour butter milk and cheese. Also cakes with hardly any sugar. If biscuits and cakes were banned, they couldn't eat them. Parents should be deciding, based on the full facts, not the government.

Having said that, only one set of parents has ever been interested in the detail of my menus.

[HateTheWait]

That's interesting, do you work in a nursery? I make muffins and cakes etc for my daughter too, even sweet ones, but no added processed sugar, just SF flour, banana, raisins, mixed spice, eggs and butter....although I do think the state should protect the children and families from private companies like nurseries with strict laws....to me a nanny state is a state interfering too much in the personal lives of people and families, but it is quite a different matter where the state is regulating the conduct of private companies that, essentially, have been set up to make the owners a living.

[HateTheWait]

I should say, it would be a ban of high processed (not natural) sugar foods, not cakes and biscuits per se. Like chocolate cake, and biscuits from a packet, that were on the menu at the nursery I withdrew my daughter from.