Family | Self | Parenting
Mom Gets Snack Shamed By Teacher After Sending Her 3-Year-Old To School With Chips
Changing societal standards are running up against actual parenting demands.
--
It all started with good intentions.
A mother, who goes by Peavey Megan on TikTok, sent her 3-year-old son to school with a small bag of snacks.
Later, she picked him up from preschool (which she was paying for). As she prepared her son’s lunchbox for the next day, she found one of his empty pringles cartons and saw a note contained within:
It said, “Please help us make healthy choices at school.”
Megan was angry about the message, “They snack-shamed me and snack-shamed my son by writing this passive-aggressive note on his trash.”
She said she wished they had just reached out to her directly if they had an issue with his food. She added that he went to school with a granola bar, yogurt, and fruit. It wasn’t just chips.
She added that, at home, they eat healthy but don’t police and call out every type of food as healthy or unhealthy.
Megan works in mental health counseling so is wary of being too rigid on certain things with her children. She worried it might cause her son to feel too much guilt about what he eats, which could snowball into adulthood and lead to a bad relationship with food and, potentially, eating disorders.
In the school's defense, they had emphasized at the beginning of enrollment that they hoped parents would pack healthy food for their children. They didn’t want it to be a free-for-all.
One problem, per dieticians, is that being too strict with food can backfire. Kids will start hiding food or, when they have access to food, they will overeat. They’ll think it will be long before they can get to it again.
Good/bad labeling of food can lead young children to grow fearful of certain foods regardless of how dangerous those foods actually are.
