Healthy Lunches, Happy Kids: Rethinking Food and Learning

I want to talk a little bit about the lunch that you send to school with your kids.

Remember, I’m a mum as well. My kids are older now, but if I go back to their primary school years, it was always difficult for me to figure out not only what I had in the house but also what they liked and whether they would eat it.

Nothing frustrated me more than having my kids come home with their lunchboxes full, especially if I’d put effort into their lunches. So I really get it.

The trick with this is understanding what your kids are experiencing at school when they have a lunchbox that looks like your child’s.

The Lunchbox Dilemma

Let’s say, for example, you send a very healthy, very well-made, possibly expensive lunch to school, and your child comes home without having eaten it. There’s that dilemma.

The second one is that you send a whole lot of rubbish off to school. Your child eats it all, but they potentially have a really bad day because they’ve had so many sugar spikes. That’s another dilemma.

So how do we solve this lunch problem?

Rethinking School-Provided Meals

One of the ways I wanted to solve it, from a school’s perspective, was to offer a cooked meal to children every day.

We did that for a couple of years a while ago, and it had its benefits.

But then I asked myself this question. What am I trying to do as a school? Am I only trying to get children to be healthy so they can learn, or am I trying to resolve a couple of things in their lives so they are always healthy and able to learn?

I regard myself and Omatas Learning Centre as an intervention school. In other words, what I’m trying to do is intervene in as many places as necessary so the child is stronger, happier, and more capable, so they can go on to their next school and continue those skills.

Empowering Families

When I provide everything, the child almost becomes more in my care than in the family’s.

So I stopped providing lunches.

Now my mission is to develop an understanding among parents of the value of providing good-quality food, and among teachers of putting together a structure at school that enables children to eat their food.

Understanding Feeding Challenges

There are so many things that come into this.

There are sensory difficulties in which children may or may not be able to eat certain types of food.

Recently, I’ve worked with an OT on SOS feeding, which has broadened my understanding even further. A child might say they don’t like a carrot, but actually, they can’t chew it. There are some children who literally haven’t developed the ability to chew.

So we’re developing that at school. At the moment, we’re doing Monday sessions where an OT is developing the child’s ability to move their mouth, to swallow, to suck, to chew, and to perform the processes they need to enjoy a range of foods.

Sensory and Emotional Relationship with Food

The next thing we’re working on is the sensory side.

Children often won’t eat something because it’s too slimy, too hard, or whatever. So we’ve got to work on that.

We want to increase the range of foods a child is prepared to eat, and develop how they think about food when they see it. What is their first thought process?

We also want to develop a healthy relationship with food.

There is a lot of unhealthy thinking about food these days, and much of it is coming through social media. We’re trying to counteract that, especially for young children.

Creating Space for Eating

If we can increase the range of food a child is prepared to eat, that’s the first level.

The second level is creating space for eating.

Many children want to go straight from the classroom and don’t want to think about food. They want to go and play, they want to run.

So how do we create space, time, and headspace in the school day for children to sit down and enjoy their meal?

This is where we create a community around eating, where children sit together with each other, connect with teachers, and spend a few minutes normalising eating.

Building Healthy Food Habits

The third level is having a healthy range of food for them to eat.

If I call it the crinkle-cut lunch, or the crinkle food, when children open their lunchbox and everything is in a packet that they’ve got to open, that can’t be healthy. It’s full of preservatives, excessive salt, and excessive sugar.

Young bodies really do need as many healthy options as possible. They need good quality protein, fruits, and good fibre for their stomachs to function well.

They really don’t need sugar. They might like it, but they don’t need it.

A Community Approach to Nutrition

What I’m trying to do, from a community point of view at school, is to normalise healthy eating and almost normalise the rejection of unhealthy food.

We don’t need it. It might be a nice to have, and we can have it, but it can’t be a daily thing.

This is a process, and all the children at school are at different stages in that process. Everybody is accepting of each other.

The idea is that, at the end of your journey with me, your child is a better eater. They are able to make better decisions for themselves.

The Gut-Brain Connection

You can do all the research that I’ve done as well, but we need to understand that our gut is our second brain.

If our gut system is not operating well, it’s going to affect our ability to pay attention. It’s going to affect our ability to understand things, our processing speed, and our level of energy.

All of that is impacted by what we eat.

If we can resolve this for children, we can resolve a lot of the issues that you’re going through, without medication.