They Say: Parents Pack Bad Lunches
My daughter gets the kind of lunch kids dream about. Sandwich. Fruit. Snacks. Milk or juice. But is that good enough?
A new study says parents aren’t packing nutrition in their kids’ lunch pails. We’re packing what we know our kids will eat.
Can you blame us? We don’t want to hear from our daycare providers
that our kid was the one throwing a fit at lunchtime. And we don’t have
time for the “sneak it in there” recipes in all the parenting
magazines. So we cut corners. We pack a fruit cup rather than cutting
up fresh fruit, because if we chuck in an apple our kids are going to
moan about the peels and the teachers at daycare aren’t likely to sit
down and peel it for them. We pick up crackers with the processed
cheese of our childhoods, and we close one eye so only the words “whole
wheat crackers” register.
According to the study in the January issue of the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, seventy-one percent of packed lunches don’t have
enough fruits and vegetables. One in four preschool kids don’t get enough milk with lunch.
Interviews
with parents revealed more than sixty percent were packing foods they
thought were nutritious – but not expecting their kids to eat them.
More than sixty percent also packed foods they figured the kids WOULD
eat.
So what’s the trouble? It’s hard to track what your kids are doing
out of sight. You can balance how much “good” and how much “bad” they
eat at home during dinnertime, but kids don’t have that guidance at a
daycare center. It sounds like parents are giving their kids too many
choices. If you know they will overeat on snacks, don’t pack them. Are
we really afraid our kids will starve if we give them choices of
healthy vs. nutritious?
It’s their first shot at learning to eat well and make healthy
choices outside of the home, but they’re still little kids. They still
need some guidance from Mom and Dad. When we’re not there, that means
making the tough choice for them.
Image: Family.Go
Related Posts:
School to Parents: Donate Toilet Paper
i do not eat my lunch and if i do not eat my lunch my mum does not do me lunch.
i do not eat my lunch and if i do not eat my lunch my mum does not do me lunch.
Actually, Leahsmom is 100% right. I have read in numerous parenting magazines that what a person eats at any one meal does not matter, and that goes for adults as well as children. It’s what one eats over the course of a week that matters. You don’t even have to make sure you are getting all the nutrition you need in one day let alone one meal. A healthy diet consists MOSTLY of healthful foods, but not entirely (which is unrealistic, anyway, in most cases) and definitely not all at once. These “studies” piss me off. The only purpose they serve is to add to the guilt parents already deal with unmercifully, but guilting parents is a business (and a lucrative one at that.) Do they bother to “study” these same children’s overall diets? If you were to look at my daughter’s lunch that I send her to school with, you would think I was completely neglecting her. But I have learned through trial and error what she will and won’t eat. I have learned not to bother feeding her very much at lunch because she is still full from snack time and will eat a huge snack an hour later when she gets home. Sometimes those snacks are healthy, sometimes not so much;) But I try!
I’m not saying you need to feed your kids junk food, and I’m sorry if I gave that impression. I was trying to come up with an example, though, of some clearly not-nutritious foods that kids in some families do actually eat – in my family, it was cornmeal chicken. We couldn’t get her to eat anything but baked cornmeal chicken for two weeks. I’m just wondering if the ADA “study” was to look at lunches over a single day – on any given day, I’d betcha 70% of lunches are not nutritious, and for any given kid, you could look at a month-long span, and depending on what the kid is doing, find a 70% fail rate. I think that’s a normal part of growing up.
If kids are coming to doctors malnourished, if you’re finding over five years that most kids aren’t getting a majority of what they need – that would be different. But to me, this smacks a lot of the cornmeal chicken panic of 2004 at our house.
Maybe it’s the tone of the article. If instead of glooming about 11% with poor whole grains we could say that 89% percent of the lunches in the study had adequate whole grains. Whoo! That’s big considering whole grains is a relatively recent nutritional guideline. Of course, starch is cheap and easy and most prepackaged products are working them in, but still, 89%. Well done!
Yep, gotta work on the fruits and vegetables. But who here has never heard of a preschooler with issues about fruits and veggies? It’s pretty common, and most pediatricians say they’ll grow out of it. Meanwhile, keep offering them, supplement with a multi-vitamin, and stop worrying.
And I can understand about not wanting to mess with cold packs and dairy products at lunch. Most parents probably make up for it at other meals.
I know that my daughter is happy to eat more of the foods she likes at a meal but suddenly no longer hungry if the only options are the foods she doesn’t like. I’d rather she be full and happy and able to concentrate in school vs sending a nutritionally appropriate snack that she doesn’t eat.
And just because you pack it doesn’t mean the kids will eat it. Half the fun at lunch when I was a child was to swap the food.
A cookie for my applesauce? Score!
I know what I am about to say is going to sound incredibly snotty, but here goes.
For this study, they looked at schools in Texas. When I have been to Texas for work trips, I noticed that the adults did not eat very many fruits or veggies. Is this really representative of the entire US?
Right, but if a study shows that 71% of lunches don’t have enough fruits and vegetables according to the American Dietetic Association’s guidelines, doesn’t that mean anything? Should we not have any guidelines at all? Are we saying that the American Dietetic Association is elitist or for elitists? This is just one (probably flawed) study that shows that kids aren’t getting what they should be getting to eat and drink. I have seen kids bring in two bags of chips, a beef jerky, and two containers of colored sugar water for lunch. In those situations, the cost of food and lack of information about nutrition were both factors. Other parents spend quite a bit of money on packaged food their kids like (such as Lunchables) that they might think are healthy enough. Should nutritionists stop providing information about what is and isn’t healthy? Of course there are differing opinions on what constitutes healthy food, but this article focuses on fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and milk. Those are pretty widely accepted to be important components of a healthy diet. If parents can’t afford those food items, that is an entirely different topic.
We all try to do what’s best for our kids. I pack snacks and lunches that are similar to Knitty’s–sandwich on whole wheat, a veggie (broccoli or carrots work with my kids), a fruit and some kind of treat. What would these people recommend we pack??? And isn’t eating anything better than eating nothing??? I mean there’s more nutrition in a fruit cup or even a pudding cup than in nothing.
I’m all for some sort of advice on what to pack.
The thing is, Manjari, there is no widespread agreement on what “healthy food” is. In some cultures, it’s food, period. In some households, it’s all-organic home-grown never-seen-a-pesticide whatever. I consider a lunch consisting of a peanut butter sandwich on whole wheat, apple slices, carrot sticks, and a cookie to be perfectly healthy. My best friend would have a heart attack over the cookie. Another friend only considers wheat-germ/sprout salad etc. to be healthy; everything else is borderline “abuse.”
“If you don’t give your kids artificial crap to eat, then you are somehow elitist and judgmental?”
No. But if you expect everyone else to feed their children by your standards… then yes.
I don’t think my pediatrician would tell me to just feed my kids Cheetos if that’s all they want to eat. I don’t see what is so awful about healthy eating. I’m not saying kids should never have treats, but I don’t see why junk food is essential. If you don’t give your kids artificial crap to eat, then you are somehow elitist and judgmental? My mom always sent me to school with healthy lunches, and I have always loved almost all vegetables and other healthy food. My parents weren’t rich, and they didn’t have money to burn. I didn’t throw away the yummy, healthy food my mom prepared for me. I understand that all kids are different, and some are pickier than others. Still, hasn’t any one noticed that healthy, hungry kids will not starve to death when all they are offered is healthy food?
leahsmom: hear, hear!!
So here’s the thing, almost ANY pediatrician will tell you, if your kids a picky eater, don’t freak out. You don’t have to be the nutrition police for your kid to be healthy, measuring every nutrient out on the scale. If all they eat is Cheetos, feed ‘em Cheetos until they get tired of it, because unless you spend all your time telling your kid she’s fat and a cow and teaching her to vomit (like my bulimic friend’s dad did starting at age 3), your kid will likely eat whatever he or she needs to. When his or her needs change, they’ll want different foods. That’s how it works.
Schools need to be told the same thing. Everyone needs to calm down about what kids are eating and not worry about it so much. Is your kid growing? Are they generally happy? Then leave well enough alone! Schools, maybe you could worry about things like – I dunno, teaching my kid to read? Instead of teaching her that she’s a bad girl for eating potatoes, which are an evil food.
Ridiculous. Kids need to eat, and parents need to pack them food they won’t chuck into the nearest bin. So long as those lunches don’t consist entirely of fat and sugar, I don’t see what the big deal is. Our kids are enormously blessed to have safe, nutritious food readily available to them, unlike kids in the majority of the world, and the nutrition police need to back the hell off.
And it’s also a class issue. Parents who need to make ends meet will pack lunches their kids will eat; parents with money to burn will pack lunches “for show” fully aware that most of it will land in the trash.