Death and taxes aren’t the only certainties in life: another is that kids love sweets. You could give a child sweets for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and they’d still want a dessert.
Now, adults are partial to sweets too, of course, but by adulthood most of us discover a level of restraint. Maybe it’s the threat of diabetes, maybe it’s a cavity or two, or maybe it’s the development of a more-refined palate.
At any rate, the general wisdom is that packing your kid’s lunchbox with sweets is not exactly a healthy choice, nor is it conducive to teaching kids about eating treats in moderation.
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By all means, eat what you like, but the facts don’t lie. If you pack yourself out with sugar all the time, you’re going to suffer some health-related consequences down the line.
Sadly, this is a regular battle ground between parents and schools. School staff have a duty of care for the attending children, as well as a role in shaping them into well-rounded adults.
Promoting healthy eating practices is just one element of that, but it often falls foul of parents’ own views on what their kids should be eating.
Such was the case when a dad going by @teddyevascents on TikTok got riled up when his daughter informed him that a dinner lady had told her that the sweets in her lunchbox were unhealthy.
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The nerve!
Anyway, incensed by someone’s attempt to encourage his child to eat healthily, the dad saw fit to leave an angry note in his kid’s lunchbox, complete with a picture of the child in question for the avoidance of doubt.
“Kids at school have been getting s**t off one of the dinner ladies,” he said in the corresponding TikTok video, “for eating non-healthy food”. He said he found this “f**king irritating”. If he thinks that's irritating, he should try experiencing tooth decay.
He said the affair was putting his daughter off taking a packed lunch to school. Who knows, maybe she’d taken the advice on board?
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Papa certainly didn’t, at any rate.
He produced a few notes for his daughter to show school staff should she be advised against eating unhealthy food again, with those detailing his full consent for her to eat whatever she likes.
"It's alright if you eat the chocolate cake the school gives you, but you put one in their lunchbox they go 'oh you shouldn't have that'," he said whilst brandishing a packet of sweets that almost certainly contains more sugar than the average slice of chocolate cake.
"Welcome to my daughter's lunchbox!” reads one note. “We are aware of the contents of this box and our happy for our daughter to eat whatever she wants."
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He had prepared an alternative note that read: "Step away from the lunchbox you nosey f**king a*** bandit." His partner had advised him not to include that one and, given its homophobic overtones, it was certainly for the best.
Of course, such opprobrium and misguided rage over schools taking an interest in children’s welfare is rarely short of company on social media.
One commented that they “would rather a child ate and was full than [had] lots of 'healthy' foods they won't eat”.
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Of course, children are notoriously fussy eaters. Of course they prefer eating fruit pastilles to eating carrots! The general advice, however, is not to see this as a lost cause.
Others said the issue for them was a sense of hypocrisy on the part of schools. One parent said she had seen her child’s school “confiscate a Penguin bar from a kid's lunchbox” despite the school itself serving slices of cake.
Another said “nightmare”, the local school “promotes healthy eating” only for their child to report school dinners of “pizza and chips and some cake'.
Where do you stand on the issue? Are schools crossing a line by intervening when children bring large packets of sweets to school? Should parents be more committed to bringing their kids around to eating whole, nutritious foods?
Rachael Davis