It was with great dismay that I viewed a recent news bulletin of two unhealthy-looking parents ‘pushing’ fish & chips and hamburger packets through a fence railing to eager school children. Their justification was ‘we’re only giving the children what they want’.
The school concerned had adopted a Jamie Oliver style healthy school meals programme and some children were having diffuculty in adjusting to eating proper food. There are several issues involved here:
1. It is in a child’s nature to reject new foods and one needs to persevere - it may take dozens of attempts in some cases.
2. Children also need time to adjust to a different regime. Interfering opportunists are putting the good intentions of the school, and the health of the children, at risk.
3. If a child is asked if he/she would prefer to eat pizza and chips or a healthy meal with vegetables and salad, the answer will of course be pizza and chips. As a species, humans naturally prefer sweet/salty/starchy foods.
4. Only giving the children what they want! Since when have children been given carte blanche to make decisions on health issues? Why should they be given ‘what they want’? Surely as adults we are responsible for protecting the health and welfare of children, not the children themselves. Perhaps the next step for these unscrupulous parents is to offer a delivery service for cigarettes and alcohol, or maybe even recreational drugs. If that’s what the children want, why shouldn’t they supply them?
5. What about the parents of the children buying the junk food? It is presumed most of these parents think their children are getting a good healthy meal at school. We all know most if not all older children have access to money, hence the invention of the term ‘piggy bank pound’. This makes them consumers. It also undermines the parents and teachers of these children who want what is nutritionally best for them.
It has been shown time and time again that nutrition is important not only in terms of weight control and health, but also in enabling children to concentrate and get the most out of their education. The exploitative tactics employed by a group of ‘Waynettas’ has placed children’s health and educational development at risk. In my view, it firmly plants the perpetrators on a parallel with those who push drugs at the school gates. After all, the only difference between the two is that the effects of a high fat and sugary diet occur over time, but both essentially are deadly.