Ungroup

Companies profiting from serving low quality food to schools might be no longer safe.  A 9-year-old Scottish girl, Martha Payne, started posting pictures of the food they get served in her school.  I believe that the ubiquity of cameras in phones will really help denounce things like this that have been hidden from parents so far.  It’s mind-blowing to see what  they serve to kids, but adding insult to injury,  it’s easy to see what the strategy is.  They give junk food that kids tend to like:  pasta, hamburger, ice lolly, pizza…   all with a very obvious intention, not to get the kids complaining. In the meantime they can make a good profit with collateral damage of making future unhealthy and obese children.

I also searched for a tray from a prison and truth is that it looks better than this girl’s (see bottom pic).  Maybe inmates are tougher to mistreat than children. The blogger girl has a hard time estimating the cost of any meal at above £2, but I think she is missing the economies of scale, so I would estimate what I see at below £1.  On the other hand, young inmates in her country get twice as much, as said in an article about prison food posted on http://www.billandsheilascookbook.com ”In the UK, a prison catering manager has about £1.87 ($4) to provide food for each inmate every day. Young offender institutions are allowed double this amount at £3.81 ($8) per day”

This trays used in schools are also quite fascinating.  Of course they are convenient,  how could they not be?  that’s why they use them in prisons.  One could argue that it is a waste of time to give real plates to children as this is faster, cheaper and almost impossible to break,  but one could make that argument for the use of these trays everywhere, also for adults at home and at fancy restaurants.  If we don’t like it for ourselves we shouldn’t like it for our children, should we?

See the girl’s blog at http://neverseconds.blogspot.co.uk/

School’s tray

School’s Tray 2

School’s Tray 3

Nottingham Prison’s Tray

I have one recurring fear that I believe I share with many other parents. It is the fear of spoiling our child till the point of making of him (or her) the kind of “monster” we so easily criticized before being parents. Have you ever said to a friend or partner something like “When I have a child, I will never let him behave like that in a restaurant”? I have. Or “I like children if they are well-mannered. I cannot put up with those kids revolving around themselves like beasts and shouting and whining for anything” . Or “I don’t remember being allowed as an infant to behave like nowadays kids do” This last one is probably the truest. Since it refers to our memory. Probably we were not as well-behaved as we want to remember and chances are we were neither as toughly raised as we recall. Truth is, even if we for sure could do better today as parents, raising a child is always easier from the outside.

To comfort ourselves a bit (or not) I found this very unscientific list of the 10 signs you are raising a “little beast”:

10_Signs_Your_Toddler_is_a_Brat

I don’t know if not qualifying saves your child from being a brat, but it looks like if you can identify a few of these, then, well, then I think you have a challenge…