Giving In

When it comes to school lunches, we prefer to pack for our daughters. I’ve seen Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, I know how nutritionally deficient most school lunches are. French fries and ketchup count as vegetables – don’t even get me started on ketchup packets where tomatoes aren’t the first ingredient. Everything is breaded and fried and/or processed and prepackaged. The school menu looks like one processed food item after another, filled with artificial ingredients, fat and sodium.

Packing lunch has never been hard for Cordy. She’s a creature of habit who generally avoids new foods. And so every day she is thrilled to eat her PB&J, goldfish crackers and Annie’s fruit snacks. She even turns her nose up at chocolate milk because it’s different. (And we’re not about to try to push her on that, either.) She comes home each day with an empty lunchbox and usually a little peanut butter still on her mouth.

Mira is another story. At the beginning of the school year, she was thrilled to have a packed lunch like Cordy. She carried her lunch bag with pride, pointing out her name written in Sharpie on the top. But then she arrived at school and saw what the other kids were eating. And she saw the chocolate milk. She begged for chocolate milk – after all, chocolate ice cream was great, so chocolate milk must be awesome, right?

Even though she didn’t pay for a lunch, her teachers started giving her small cups of the chocolate milk because they always had extras. We frowned on it, but didn’t outright forbid it, and quickly learned that her teachers – like so many others – aren’t immune to her charms. So she started drinking chocolate milk with lunch.

But then I noticed she’d come home from preschool and some of her lunch was still in the bag. Sometimes she’d walk in the door and immediately tell me she wanted to eat her goldfish crackers, so I figured she was simply saving them for an afternoon snack. Occasionally I’d see notes from the teacher that she ate some of the school lunch, too, and they didn’t mind because they always have extras. Okaaaaaay then.

Over the past few weeks, though, Mira has come home with most of her lunch still tucked safely in her lunch bag. It’s frustrating to have to throw away an entire PB&J sandwich, and Aaron (who makes the lunches in the morning because I’m at work) was getting increasingly angry with her. He decided to try a different approach, thinking that maybe Mira wants more variety in her lunch. He began asking her each morning what she wanted for lunch, and then packing her requests. We hoped this would solve the problem.

However, earlier this week she brought home a salami and cheese sandwich, untouched, along with her other lunch items. Despite asking for it that morning, she decided not to eat it and ate the school food again instead. Throwing another wasted sandwich in the trash, Aaron declared that he was done making lunches for her. I agreed.

I’m a little surprised at how easily I agreed to let her eat the school lunch. But I can’t stand to see the food that we pay so much money for wasted every day. It still makes me cringe to think of some of the foods she’s eating. The little comfort I have is that, unlike Cordy, Mira appears to have no food sensitivities to artificial ingredients, so at least the junk food doesn’t affect her behavior.

She’s a stubborn three year old and she’s found how to get her way on this issue. (Please don’t think she gets her way with everything, though. Her pout and fluttering eyelashes have only limited power on Aaron and I.) She manipulated her teachers into letting her eat the school food even though she had a perfectly good and delicious lunch in her bag each day. And she pushed us to the point where we have given up and stopped packing her lunch.

She won. Or at least she won one battle. She’s already upset that she can’t take her Thomas the Tank Engine lunch bag to school anymore, and I’m not giving in on that. There’s no point in taking an empty lunch bag to school.

Sigh. I can already tell Mira is going to be a challenge as she gets older. I only hope I can convince her to use her master powers of manipulation for good, not evil.

 T.R.O.U.B.L.E.
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Comments

  1. It’s all about choosing your battles, right? Especially with a three year old. Just make sure that dinner is nutrient-packed and snacks at home are good, and she’ll be fine. Though I understand why you cringe.

  2. When my nephew was in preschool they wouldn’t let him pack because he had to eat what everyone else was eating because they didn’t want to have any issues with kids wanting other stuff. This is my nephew with the sensory disorders and he wouldn’t eat the other stuff. I am glad that Mira is on the other side of the fence, but I still can’t believe that the teachers would just give her the food. UGH.

    The girls pack most of the time because here Little Debbie snacks are considered part of the protein of the meal. Plus, when The Chicken gets home from school when she buys she is starving.

  3. I should add that her teachers are the same wonderful preschool teachers that helped pull Cordy out of the darkest days of her autism. They watched Mira grow from a baby to a toddler while Cordy was with them. I honestly love them, and I understand how they can give in to Mira.

    It’s a special needs class, and even though Mira’s in there for speech issues, otherwise she’s really a “typical peer” and is a big help for them. So I get that her smile and big eyes sway them to give in to her, and they know she has no food allergies or sensitivities.

    I could tell them to stop giving her school food outright, but I think that might be a bad situation all around. They have enough kids with behavior problems on their hands that I don’t want to add one more to the pile. (And OH the problem she’d be to them!)

    It’s easier to let her win this battle and focus on the larger war, I think. Like Karen said, my main focus is trying to make sure she eats healthy at home now.

  4. I’m curious why you didn’t just tell the teachers to stop giving her food she wasn’t supposed to have? I’m just wondering, I haven’t gotten to the school lunch age with my kids yet and am curious if those requests are usually ignored?

  5. I find it upsetting that her teachers were giving her the school lunch even though you packed her a lunch. That seem inappropriate. My daughter doesn’t go to school yet but I already worry about all the junk kids are fed a school these days. I don’t remember any food in the classroom other than cold orange slices durring heat waves when I was a kid.

    That being said you have to pick your battles and if she doesn’t react poorly to the food at school and she eats well at home I see no real harm in eating the school lunch.

  6. I fear that BB will have some of these same issues. Or, not. Maybe his texture issues will make him stay away from school lunches. That said, the lure of chocolate milk MAY be too much. Sigh.

  7. I was just curious. We have a “we want to make their lunches” theory for our future but who the heck knows how things will go down in reality. Nothing is ever as simple as it seems. Those are all good reasons to let the lunch thing pass.

  8. Just ran across this article and it made me think of this post: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2011/01/14/MNSG1H8I4L.DTL

    Small steps, right? I flip-flopped between school lunches and packed lunches through my childhood because for a while my family qualified for the reduced-lunch program. The lunch ladies called me “everything girl,” because when they asked me what I wanted I said I wanted some of everything, especially veggies. I realize I’m darned lucky that I love vegetables as much as I do, and I’m hoping any children I have inherit my taste buds.

  9. I cringe at pre school lunches and so I’ve always packed my kids lunches. However I was reading the menu for my sons elementary school and I was so stunned by it. All whole grains. Two or three veggie choices every day. Nothing fried. A salad bar. Two or more fruit choices. A vegetarian choice every day. Plus low fat low sodium options, and a variety of foods, asian, mexican, america, italian. I am actually pretty jealous nothing like when I was in school.

    You can click into the school and view the lunch menu there is a link for it, pretty cool no high fructose corn syrup either

  10. I know that school lunches have definitely improved since my elementary days. At my best friend’s kids’ school they even have a vegetarian option every single day. I agree, you have to choose your battles. It sounds like she’s doing well.