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Anonymous wrote:Some of you are being weirdly defensive about crackers when we are talking about Doritos and cookies. Not everything is about you.
Also, just spitballing here but fruits/veggies that could easily make it 3-4 hours without an ice pack:
Apples
Bananas
Clementines
Grapes
Pears
Carrots
Peppers
Cucumbers
Grape tomatoes
Exactly. My kids don’t eat the healthiest by any means. Our “snack cabinet” (food that they can choose occasionally (not daily) for an after school treat right now contains: pop tarts, trail mix packs w m&ms, plain ruffles potato chips, little fruit squeeze pouches that I know have tons of sugar, etc. So I’m not exactly super strict on providing only healthy snacks.
But, no, parents sending this junk for snack every single day all school year are not “doing the best they can.” You can buy a bunch of bananas or a bag of apples cheaper than that costco size pack of Doritos or Oreos. They don’t need to be refrigerated. If your kid won’t eat an apple or a banana and you can’t use ice packs, plain popcorn or pretzels are also very cheap and easy things to send still healthier than Cheetos or chips ahoy. I volunteer at my kids’ school lunch often and it’s honestly really sad and appalling what most kids are eating on a regular basis—both those who bring home lunch and those who get school lunch.
LOL Please explain the health benefits of pretzels.
Pretzels have a lower calorie and fat content than Doritos. They have a lower fat, calorie, and sugar count than cookies. I'm not the PP, but I think pretzels were suggested as better than Doritos or potato chips for a snack. Certainly we all know they aren't as nutritious as say kale, but there's a place for carbs in a healthy diet.
Fat isn't unhealthy and most the fat in Doritos isn't even saturated. Doritos are probably healthier for a lot of kids depending on the rest of their diet.
Nobody said fat is unhealthy. But I will say that Doritos aren't healthier than pretzels.
And you'd be wrong, because "healthy" isn't a concept that exists in a vaccuum. Some kids need more fat in their diet because they don't naturally want to eat much. I have one like this, and I'd much rather see her eating Doritos than pretzels. She'd prefer the pretzels, but sometimes I push stuff like Doritos that would be less healthy for me, because her dietary needs are different.
So do you think that's why many kids are bringing whole sleeves of cookies for snack, or is your kid maybe an outlier?
DP. All kids are outliers. You are operating from the standpoint that the vast majority of kids need the same thing, and that you can dictate what that is. You are ignoring people in this thread who are saying "hey my kid's situation is different than yours, the stuff you are deeming unhealthy is actually a win for my kid in this specific situation." You want to dismiss each example like this as an "outlier" because it challenges your belief that there is simply a correct way to feed kids in this situation and you know what it is and anyone deviating must be wrong. What we're explaining is that if it's not your kid, you have NO IDEA what they need. You don't know how the family arrived at whatever the snack is. You think it's up to you to approve or disapprove of some other kid's snack without knowing the circumstances, and if someone says "hey here are the circumstance that actually make what you think is unhealthy appropriate for my kid in this situation," you immediately dismiss that one person as an outlier.
You don't know what other people's kids need. And you're not going to find out by simply ignoring every single parent telling you that their kid needs something different than what yours might need.
The denial on this thread is unreal.
So you don't think underweight kids exist? All kids are overweight and need to go on diets?
My starting point is that a package of Doritos or sleeve of cookies isn't a great shack choice for most kids. If some kid is underweight and the pediatrician has recommended Doritos, fine. But I would be surprised if that's a concern for most kids. Being underweight is an outlier (a word that a poster upthread didn't like, but it's true).
It's not that I don't like the word outlier, it's that you are using it wrong.
Outlier implies that the vast majority of a group is homogenous, and that the outlier differs from the norm. However, as has been explained ad nauseam on this thread to people who don't want to hear it, kids have a variety of nutritional needs and they aren't all the same. Some kids are overweight. Some kids are underweight. Some kids are avoidant of food generally or avoidant of certain foods. Some kids are prone to behavioral issues when hungry. Some kids are athletes with high calorie needs. Some kids have allergies that impact both what they can eat and their appetites. And on and on. There's no norm. I just listed a bunch of kids' in my child's classroom. The same classroom.
To then say that all of these kids need to eat the same kind of snack, or that what is healthy for one kid is going to be healthy for most of the others, is to ignore the fact that these kids are growing at different rates, have different health needs and personalities, are having different kinds of days. To dismiss a parent saying "My kid is underweight and I send I high calorie pre-packaged snacks because he needs to gain weight" as an outlier, is to assume that the vast majority of kids are at or above a health weight and don't have higher calorie needs. Can you really say that? How? How do you know?
Look, I'm not defending junk in schools. I actually hate it too. I work hard to send my kid to school with healthy food and it drives me nuts when she comes home saying "all the kids have cookies" or "the teachers gave us Doritos as a treat." I wish that didn't happen and I would never condone a sleeve of Oreos as a healthy snack, that's absurd. But in general I try to withhold judgement because I don't know what's going on in other people's homes or with those kids. Maybe that kid with the sleeve of Oreos is being bullied and his mom was like "screw it, if this is the one thing about your day you are excited about, so be it." I don't know! I see people in this thread judging food I do send to school that I think actually are perfectly healthy, or at least not unhealthy. I see people in this thread imposing what I actually think are disordered ideas about calorie restriction or the "purity" of certain foods on everyone else and claiming it's healthy (so common on DCUM, eating disorders get normalized on here all the time).
Thus my conclusion is: mind your own business. Worry about your own kid and if you need to silently roll your eyes at some of the stuff other kids are eating fine. But sitting around trying to tell everyone what to feed their kids, calling kids pigs, thinking you know all there is to know about another child's nutrition? It's not productive. It's potentially harmful. I hope it's outlier behavior but I know it probably isn't.
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