Parental Food Responsibility

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/255702/will-mrs-obama-downsize-your-kid-mona-charen

The amount of all of this food that winds up uneaten in the trash can only be guessed at (though anecdotal evidence abounds). Wouldn’t it make more sense, economically, nutritionally, and (importantly) socially to eliminate school lunches altogether? Parents can pack a highly nutritious turkey, tuna, or peanut-butter sandwich with an apple or an orange. Poor parents can afford to do this with help from the food stamp program. The older kids can pack their own lunches. (A child who repeatedly showed up at school without lunch would receive attention from child protective services.) Most of the parent-supervised lunches would be superior in nutrition and taste to anything the government could serve (some kids might even find an affectionate note from mom or dad in their lunch boxes). But more importantly, the principle that parents are responsible for their children would be ratified.


The National School Lunch program, enacted in 1946, was devised with two goals in mind. The first was to subsidize farmers by purchasing huge blocs of “excess” commodities in order to keep prices up. Only secondarily did the government intend to help feed hungry children.



Parents are responsible for their children; the government is not. When the government can tell us how to feed our children, by law and decree, then we, as parents have given up yet another freedom of deciding how our children should be raised.

Childhood obesity is a horrible thing; there is no denying this. Children used to run and play outside for hours (regardless of the weather); bicycle to friends houses, into town to the store and all over the place. Not so many years ago, kids rode their bikes to school. I have to admit as a parent, I have paused several times before ‘allowing’ my sons to bike places around our town; danger lurks at the skate park, the bike jumps, around the corner and crossing the street (those of you in Redmond know how quickly we all drive down 166th). I’m not a helicopter parent; but there ARE pedophiles, kidnappers and all other sorts of dangers that are in our neighborhoods; probably not more than when I was growing up, but certainly the threat is more visible now. We live in a suburban area, not the city, so I’m sure that city dwellers with children have these same fears multiplied several times over.

I think the answer is to give parents more responsibility – to expect it from them. Parenting is not a hands-off sort of job description; there are lots of areas that need constant micro-managing to achieve success. Teaching our children ways to play; how to play, where to play, when to play is as important as teaching them to say ‘Please’ and ‘Thank You’. Dragging kids to karate, baseball, hockey and ballet are all fine ways to get the kids experience at new ideas, health, mental and physical conditioning, but they are not PLAY experiences. Play dates are fine; but so many times a play date is where the kids play video games together, watch a movie on the big screen (which in my childhood, the ‘big screen’ was a movie theater) or playing action figures on the carpet. There are no games of tag or street hockey or backyard baseball against all the neighborhood kids.

Many of the parents in my ‘sphere’ lament that their kids never go outside. Of course not; we live in a society completely overshadowed by electronics: Game systems, wireless internet, cell phone, cable/satellite TV, DVR’s and MP3 players. Nothing wrong with those things; but as with everything in moderation.

Helping children choose the most appropriate foods to eat is not a government dictate; it’s a lifelong learning experience. Apple slices or French Fries? Chocolate Milk or Soda? A handful of chips or the entire bag? Kids will eat, in most cases, what they want to eat. As a parent of four children (two adults), I have struggled through the child who doesn’t like peas, while her sister doesn’t like beans. The child who will eat pasta in any way with an sauce and the child who thinks pasta is solely for art/crafts projects are the same children who love pepperoni pizza with olives. There is nothing wrong with any of these choices, however the quantities of these foods they consume could be the issue if combined with sitting on the couch or chair while absorbing massive quantities of electronics into their motionless bodies.

Regulating what our children eat while at school is not the issue here. Regulating the amounts of foods that are ‘legal’ to purchase is also not the issue. People smoke and drink (and do drugs) regardless of whether it is legal or not, healthy or not, penalized or not. Do away with school lunches altogether and make parents once again responsible for their children’s health and well-being.