A mom has hit back at her son’s pre-school for confiscating food from her son’s lunch box in an effort to ‘encourage’ healthy choices.
Mom of two, Emma Clarke, from the UK, said the pre-school’s strict food policy means they seize everything from fruit, juices, smoothies, nuts and jam sandwiches.
She says they even ban cake on the kids’ birthdays and make them celebrate with a wooden cake.
Recently, Emma had enough of the lunch box policing and decided to write a note to the school with one simple message…
Emma was first alerted to the strict rules when she found out her four-year-old son Archie’s packet of 99-calorie mini cookies were removed from his lunch box on his first day.
She was left even more horrified when the same thing happened later that week with a packet of chips.
The preschool returns the food to the lunch box at the end of the day “because they are fine to eat when [kids] are not at preschool.”
Emma claims that both times she packed her son a “well-balanced lunch” including a sandwich, fruit, yogurt and a lunch-box-sized snack.
One time, they even confiscated one of his two mandarins because “one was enough.”
Emma says that she thinks teachers shouldn’t be able to have a say in what her son can and can’t eat and is worried about what this is teaching kids.
Several similar incidents have occurred during Archie’s 10 months at the preschool, to the point that a teacher even pulled Emma aside at pick-up and handed her a list of their ‘rules’ for lunch boxes.
It says: “Please do not include sweets, fizzy drinks, fruit drinks, smoothies, chips, salty snacks, chocolate, biscuits, cakes or jam sandwiches. They also suggest “small portions.”
And then the letter outlines an ideal lunchbox: a wholegrain roll, fruit, an individual cheese portion or yogurt, a portion of lean meat and a bottle of water.
The school’s headteacher said that their rules are “very similar to those seen in nearly all preschools nationwide” and defended their choices as they “encourage healthy choices for the children.”
Emma’s son has now been left worried about what his mom packs him for lunch, in fear of getting things confiscated.
“They open up the lunchboxes and take the items out in front of them,” Emma explains, adding that she’s worried about what sort of language the teachers use around food.
So she decided to take a stance. “I told them I wasn’t happy with them taking food off him and once I actually put a note in his lunchbox telling them not to remove any items and they still did,” Emma says.
This was the note:
It read: “Please can everything remain in Archie’s lunch to eat, thank you.”
After the message failed to get through to the teachers, Archie is still left fretting over his lunch box.
“It feels like a tick box exercise so the nursery can be recognized as a healthy-eating place,” Emma reflects on the situation.
‘It’s just so if someone from the council came in and looked at what was in their lunchbox, they would be in trouble if they weren’t sticking to their healthy school lunches.”