Posted on 05/07/2017 4:41:21 AM PDT by Kaslin
I learned a new term this week: lunch shaming. What is lunch shaming? It’s when parents don’t pay their children’s lunch bills at school so the schools make them eat food I lived a large portion of my life surviving off of.
We really are out of problems if this is an issue worthy concern for society.
The New York Times had a big story on how children were made to eat cheese sandwiches because their parents had paid off their school lunch debt.
Now, it’s been a while since I was in school, but I do remember school lunches costing a couple of bucks. And I remember I was allowed to buy a school lunch one day per week because that was all my parents could afford. Free lunch was not an option. While we might have qualified – I honestly have no idea how much my father made but I know it wasn’t a lot – the government teat was not an option. My family had pride and my parents provided for me and my siblings, undoubtedly at their own expense.
The idea of parental sacrifice for the good of their children is now dead. “The school will feed them” is the new way of life. But it shouldn’t be.
One of the students mentioned in the Times piece said, “I was so embarrassed,” about being denied the school food she wanted and given lesser “cheese sandwich” level food…for free.
According to the paper, the family qualified for free lunches but “a paperwork mix-up” caused confusion and led to the denial. No, bad and lazy parenting led to the denial.
I know we’re not supposed to say it, but if a parent won’t provide basic food for their kids they’re bad parents. With all the social programs and food stamps available, how much “help” do people need?
My mother lost her right leg above the knee when I was 9, yet she made sure to make lunch every day. She made sure I ate breakfast every single day before I left for school. I’m sure she would have rather slept in, could’ve found more enjoyable use for the time and money to make me lunch, but she did it because it was her responsibility. And she did it because she loved me.
That last part is the most important. Being a parent means loving your children, and taking care of their basic needs is how that love is expressed most frequently and effectively.
My dad drove a forklift 5 days a week and a Zamboni on the weekends to provide for me and my 4 siblings, and my mother took care of feeding us. There was never any doubt about their love, even when me and my brother and sisters did our best to inspire their anger (and we did a thorough job).
Now too many kids are being taught it’s schools and government who care for them, who feed them, not parents. And far too many parents are content to cede that basic responsibility.
Schools are providing breakfast and lunch to students of bad parents, and more and more are adding dinner to the menu. I get that some people have it rough, but we do have social safety net programs. If people on those aren’t using their benefits to feed their kids, what are we paying them for?
If you won’t provide your child with food you should lose your child. Maybe that would shock their system to the point they’d get out of bed to made some oatmeal, hard-boil an egg, or make a sandwich?
All of those options, by the way, cost literally pennies per day. But the real cost is doing something that shows your kids you care enough to do something, and that’s a bridge too far for too many people these days.
Billy Shore, the head of a charity that advocates absolving parents of basic responsibility, wrote a response to what he called the “shameful” Times piece in which he writes about how schools need to feed “their kids.” But they aren’t their kids, they are their students; those kids have parents. Those parents have responsibilities they aren’t fulfilling. And in not fulfilling those responsibilities they’re conveying to their kids that government provides for them, not parents.
That’s a horrible and damaging message to give to a kid.
As much as someone caring for a kid is something they need to know, nothing will replace the role of a parent. And a parent simply shirking responsibility because someone else will do it damages kids far more than having to eat a cheese sandwich.
It’s time to judge these people, to shame them, to shun them. The student I mentioned at the open of this piece shouldn’t be mad at the school of giving her food she didn’t choose, she should be angry with her mother for choosing not to provide her with food in the first place.
Tough words but true.
What’s wrong with cheese sandwiches. I’ve always been rather fond of cheese. Bread? Not so much. America makes some of the worst bread in the world. I came to understand this after spending 14 years in Japan where bread is made from the same American wheat (mostly) but in a way where it is delicious.
Yeah, I could see if it was Limburger cheese.
Very true, but necessary.
I learned that living in the UK in the early ‘80s.
I suppose what I grew up with would be the very poor getting food from a government giveaway (though they already get that with food stamps), so parents were still at least expected to put some peanut butter and jelly between a couple of pieces of bread.
I think that somehow is an order of magnitude better than having schools provide free breakfast, lunch, and after-school “snacks”.
American white bread is dough
Sold by weight, bakers have maxed out the moisture content
My parents supplied school lunch money during high school. I would ask my friends for leftovers and deposited my lunch money in the bank so I could buy a car.
A little over the top for a lousy cheese sandwich!
Sort of like Delta taking away kids...
Don’t buy Wonderbread, then. I buy bakery bread.
What on earth is the relevance of the flock of pigeons (?) in the illustration? Are we supposed to subconsciously imagine the hungry children’s going out to hunt their own lunches rather than eat an embarrassing cheese sandwich?
I’m getting more and more irritated at the apparently random photos with every article at a variety of sites. If the programmers don’t have a picture of the specific subject, just give us text and save some electrons.
(/rant off)
I don’t care for cheese sandwiches. I was always disappointed when I found them in my lunch.
OTOH, I ate them when presented because I was hungry. And as my father once famously repeated, “If you’re hungry enough, it all tastes good”.
None of us kids starved - even the poorest kids, and we lived in a poor town with a lot of poverty. There was no such thing as a government lunch. Even the poorest of families provided a bag lunch for their kids. I can't ever remember an exception.
I am an educator and a a rather old-fashioned and conservative one at that. Schools are taking over more and more of the rolls of parents. It is disgusting. S/ Schools should should just go ahead and create dormitories and raise the little buggers from cradle to grave! S/ That, at least, is where I feel they are headed. We need more right thinking conservatives in education.
When I see the number of fat parents and fat kids today, I realize just how bad parents have become - purveyors of disease and early death to their own offspring.
Thank God some of us grew up in an earlier era.
To be sure, as the late great Philadelphia talk show host Irv Homer put it, you can't raise a thoroughbred when the parents are asses. But when the government takes so much from parents and redistribute that wealth to, among other entities, local crony capitalist food wholesalers so the schools can pay for a mandated free lunch, I can think of about 17 other things to attack first.
Harsh words...but misplaced. Swing and a miss Mr. Hunter.
A lack of shame is behind many of societies ills. Why be ashamed of failure when you can play the victimization card? Parents should be ashamed of raising feral children rather than popping out a few more to get welfare for longer. The war on poverty failed because shame wasn’t motivating people to lift themselves up.
Is the child too lazy or stupid to put a slice of bologna between two pieces of bread? If she’s old enough to whine about how “embarrassed” she was, she’s old enough to make her own danged lunch.
I’m sure school kids in Venezuela would LOVE to have a cheese sandwich.
Wonder if the lunch ladies could offer them as grilled cheese sandwiches.
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