Are we overcomplicating kids’ lunchboxes these days?

[Alyah]

I’ve noticed lately that school lunchboxes seem to have become a bit of a competition. Everywhere I look online, there are perfectly balanced bento boxes with shaped fruit, colour-coordinated snacks, and little motivational notes.
When I was at school, it was sandwiches, crisps, and maybe a piece of fruit — simple and fine. Now it feels like if you don’t send your child in with a worthy meal, you’re somehow not trying hard enough.
I do understand wanting kids to eat healthily and enjoy their food, but is it just me who thinks we’ve gone a bit overboard? I sometimes wonder if it adds unnecessary pressure on parents (and maybe even on the kids too).
What do others think — is this just the new normal, or have lunchboxes turned into another area for quiet competition?

This. The amount of food the kids in reception are served is the same as the year 6’s. My children were complaining of being hungry. And I don’t count a bit of chicken, some plain pasta and a few bits of cucumber as a decent lunch. Technically balanced yes, but a bit sad, no? And definitely not worth the £3.20 I was paying.
(Before anyone asks that was a ‘roast’. I get that the pasta and cucumber are options for those kids that don’t like potatoes / cooked veg or whatever, and in principle choice is good, but in practice my children are actually pretty unfussy but given the option will go for the blandest thing on offer and I’d prefer to take the opportunity to guide their choices while I still can!)

Mine actually love a roast, but they were coming home starving, saying that they’d had ‘hard, grey meat, I’m not sure what it was’ and ‘orange mush that fell off my fork when I tried to pick it up) (carrots!). I bought a good thermos flask each and gave them things like spaghetti bolognese or minestrone soup instead. They’re not fussy kids and will eat practically anything at home, but the school meals were tiny and inedible.

Yeah, but being skinny doesn’t automatically mean being healthy. My nephew, for example, eats a really horrible diet — mostly junk food, processed sugar, and barely any real food — and he’s super skinny. But that’s probably because he’s not getting proper nutrition, not because he’s healthy.

Also, food back then was really different. Even something as simple as bread — 20 years ago, bread was just bread. Now the stuff you buy in stores has like 20 ingredients and is closer to plastic than real food.

Maybe not individually but the generally population getting more overweight/obese isn't a gold thing.

I'm not sure that's true about the bread necessarily either. At least now it's got seeds and shit in it. We had the extremely white extremely square stuff.

We also had a lot of breaded oven food, findis crispy pancakes and angel delight. Not sure how we all got away with eating so much crap. Perhaps there was just less of it, or maybe because we ran around a lot.

The children of the 80s and 90s who ate such shite are now the population who are overweight and obese. The diet you describe sets the body up badly in childhood. It just doesn’t show until later in life.

We were skinny at the time because play was different. There was less parental involvement driving kids everywhere and we played out for hours with a lot of freedom to run and play without adult guidance. The problem for kids now, and why more young children are overweight now than before, is that kids now in general don’t have the same amount of unstructured play and physical movement. Being driven to a club is not the same as playing out all evening other than dashing in for your tea.

Exactly this. The poor eating habits that have caused the huge obesity levels in adults today were developed in their childhoods.

I arrived here because we happened upon Thefudgefamily on YouTube Kids. If anyone wants lunch box rage bait, get a load of this It's North American and off the top of the effort scale, except that there's also so much processed food, often with added peanut butter, chocolate, icing sugar and sprinkles. Not sure how a lot of it is allowed (wouldn't be at our PS).

I immediately googled insane mum lunch boxes and Google seemed to shut down my overly judgemental