When our daughter started Kindergarten, it was her first time enjoying lunch away from home. Lucky for us, the school had made great forward strides in the previous few years to improve school lunch. To be consistent with our eating habits, we decided that we’d send our daughter home-prepared meals four days each week; to let her experience school lunch, we also opened an account for her and agreed that she would buy school lunch one day each week.
Two Angry Moms
In our family, we talk constantly about keeping junk food out of the house. It is hard to make good choices when junk is around, even in your home (just ask the M&Ms around the holidays). It’s difficult to expect a child or teen to choose an apple over a sweet treat. Then, after they’ve consumed a junk-filled lunch, it’s absurd to think that kids will be able to listen and learn.
We owe it to our children to provide them with healthy, delicious food. It’s a reality that due to time, money and/or desire, the vast majority of our kids will buy many (or most) of their meals from a school lunch program.
Kudos to these mothers for working hard to improve that system. For more about Two Angry Moms, check out angrymoms.org to see a preview and many other video clips and also buy the DVD (we ordered ours as soon as we’d seen the preview: it’s on the way!). Have you seen the movie? Send us a comment below and let us know what you think about it.
Once she’d been in the cafeteria a few times, she noticed (and told us about!) all the unhealthy things that were sold in the lunch line and packed in kids’ lunch boxes. She can spot junk food from a mile away, which I guess one would expect from someone whose parents run a web site about healthy lunches. Our daughter has a modicum of self-control, but it’s a comfort to us that the school has a strict “no sharing” policy to protect kids from possible allergic reactions. Additionally, you have to sign up to allow your child to buy “treats” on the lunch account.
In December of her first year, she asked if she could buy ice cream on her account. She said many kids bought it every day, and that she thought she would like to buy it occasionally. We asked her what “occasionally” meant (we had stocked her account with enough money to buy lunch once per week for the year, with a bit extra for those occasional times that were sure to crop up). Her reply? Once a month (talk about self control!). Well… that sounded fair to us. Ice cream day would be a day she brought her lunch from home, and we’d pack a lighter lunch (sans treat) to allow her time to enjoy her ice cream.
She’s nine now, and still likes to “report in” about how she enjoyed her lunch. She’s aware of how many servings of things she should have, too. For example, last week we started to pour water for dinner and she reminded us that she’d only had one serving of dairy that day, and she really needed to have milk.
In Kindergarten, she learned that many children throw things away that they don’t like. She would come home very upset about the fact that the food was wasted, worried that children would be hungry later, and concerned that their parents wouldn’t know they didn’t like something. It started an ongoing conversation in our family. She knows that the only way we’ll know something isn’t her favorite is if she tells us, and that we don’t expect her to finish everything if she is full. On the occasional days we send something that isn’t her favorite, we have an awfully good reason (most likely: we are out of food and REALLY need to go shopping). She is generally good-natured about it, saying “I really still don’t like dried apricots, but I ate them because I know that’s what you had available to send.”
We don’t know what we’ll encounter when she gets into middle and high school, when the the environment is less regulated and fraught with peer pressure. When we previewed “Two Angry Moms,” (see sidebar) we were thrilled to see moms taking this very public. Let’s work together so that real change can come from this!
More about Amy and Scott Dawson, creators of Lunchtaker.com: One of our core focuses is on nutrition and fitness. Our children both attended a parent cooperative pre-school where the morning snack was as healthy as possible, and our family liked the opportunities for new foods that arose in pre-school. As our children go through grade school, we are focusing on continuing the trend of ensuring we feed ourselves a variety of foods, all good for our bodies... read more...
Posted Friday, March 19th, 2010 at 4:51 pm and filed under Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
