When my son was in his first daycare (the one we had to replace in an instant because it was shut down without any warning one evening by the state, but that's another story), they had a Birthday Treats Policy. And the policy was not "no candy" or "no high fructose corn syrup" or "no giant sugary balls of goodness." No, the policy was: nothing homemade.
When I first heard that this was the policy, I started to giggle because I thought it was a joke. However, the giggle quickly turned to nervous laughter that petered out, and in my awkward silence, I could see that the daycare director was totally serious.
We could bring anything we wanted for Birthday Treats. As long as that anything did not contain nuts and had not personally been made by us. We could bring giant, fist-sized sugar cookies coated in 3/4" glossy green icing and each one sprinkled with 1/4 cup of oversized colorful decorating candies. We could bring garishly yellow cupcakes studded with fake M&Ms. We could bring Peeps or buckets of candy or brownies the size of small children's heads. We could bring goodies saturated with fat, sweetened with gallons of high fructose corn syrup, colored with torturously neon shades of red and blue that would dye children's lips and cheeks for 48 hours or more.
And believe you me, people did. In the toddler room, as the children started turning two, my son started coming home with goulish lips and stained fingers from the shocking colors of icing that routinely substituted for "snack time."
His birthday rolled around, and it nearly killed me that I could not make his favorite banana mini-muffins to take in for his birthday treat.
The school's logic? Too many children with allergies meant that it was not safe to have foods on hand for which one did not know precisely all of the ingredients. Therefore, the Birthday Treats Policy had been put into place to ensure that all Birthday Treats would arrive with a convenient ingredients label.
Nevermind that store-bought treats are routinely supersized and present a serving that is probably four times what would be reasonable for a preschooler's empty calorie intake on a given day. Nevermind that there have been studies documenting the connections between HFCS and weight gain. Nevermind that many parents swear their children's behavior problems can be clearly linked to the intake of artificial colorings. Nevermind that when there are 24 toddlers turning two within a four month period, that will perhaps mean an over-abundance of sugary treats in their little tiny toddler bodies.
No, the only requirement was a pre-printed list of ingredients.
I tried to suggest that I could make the banana muffins and then bring them in with the recipe attached.
If they could have excommunicated me for my suggestion, their shocked looks said, they would have.
So we brought the hideous fist-sized cookies that my son was magnetically drawn to when I took him to the store's bakery section to choose a birthday treat.
Our second daycare has no such rule. Oh, they have a Birthday Treats Policy, but the policy basically is Birthday Treats are Gooooood, and they let us make things as long as they don't contain nuts. So we've done brownies (cut into reasonable, 1" squares, which in my opinion is all a three-year-old really needs) or rice krispie treats.
Now, in elementary school, we are encountering a new Birthday Treats Policy. This one is Birthday Treats are Baaaaaad. Apparently taking a page from my book about how children don't really need to consume giant handfuls of sugar which will only make their blood sugar plummet in 45 minutes and make learning even more difficult, the school does not allow the bringing of edible birthday treats. (Stickers, we have learned, are an acceptable Celebration Substitute.)
Not to worry, there are still the requisite Halloween Party, Thanksgiving Feast, and (I'm sure coming up) a series of other feast days during which the children will be allowed to imbibe sugary goodness with all the abandon of special treats. I don't actually think I'm opposed to this policy, for many reasons.
But I don't know what to think about the fact that we have also reentered the Land of Nothing Homemade. The official school policy is that homemade goods are not allowed on any of these feast days because homemade goods do not contain an ingredients list and teachers of children with allergies therefore cannot tell if the items are safe for certain children.
While I completely understand the dire consequences that can befall a child who eats something to which he or she is allergic, this does make me want to revert to my original question: can't I just bake the pumpkin muffins and attach the recipe when I send them in?
If I bake them, I will tell you what they will NOT contain: nuts (I'm not stupid), high fructose corn syrup, red dye of any number, yellow dye of any number, chemical preservatives to prolong freshness, unpronounceable chemicals for purposes unknown. They will contain eggs, but my recipe will tell you that. And since the sign-up sheet was sent out requesting muffins, and it's nearly impossible to make muffins without eggs, and certainly unlikely that anyone would be purchasing vegan muffins, it seems a pretty safe bet that any store-bought muffins would contain eggs too.
So I proposed the muffins-with-recipe-attached alternative to my son's kindergarten teacher, and she said she thought that sounded like a very good plan. I am delighted. So is Son, since he has been asking to help make pumpkin muffins to take to school for the Thanksgiving Feast for several weeks now.
But this individual teacher's compromise with me still begs the question: is it a better policy for schools to require store-bought goodies? Are children with allergies better served by an ingredients list on a packaging label than they are by my taped-on recipe? If so, how? If the issue is one of trace elements, I will tell you after having lived for a few years with this policy in the past that it is next to impossible to find ANY baked goods or similar suitable treats that do NOT say somewhere on the label that the item, while not containing nuts as an ingredient, may have been prepared in a facility that once had a nut as a guest on Bring a Nut to Work Day. So, I don't think that items coming out of my kitchen, in which nuts have occasionally existed, are any more or less dangerous than those store-bought baked goods for a very severely allergic child.
Unless all the feast day treats are going to be unsweetened applesauce, there are going to be things containing eggs, gluten, and produced in places that might result in trace exposure to nuts.
How is that different than my kitchen counters? And isn't it better that in my kitchen, there are no ingredients whose names contain numbers, or 28 letters, or unpronouncable combinations of syllables? Overall for the health of children, if treats are going to be had, aren't homemade things better than store-bought ones? Or at the very least, certainly not worse?
These are honest questions, not sarcastic ones. I don't have a child with food allergies. I do worry about junk food (Fruit Loops cereal is an option at snack time in the after-school program, for goodness sake). And I don't know what the norm is in terms of school policies. What's it like where your kids go to school? And what kind of policies do you think make the most sense, assuming we are still going to let our children be children and celebrate with occasional party days in the classrooms?
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Party Treats on School Days
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12 comments:
Hmm, I think you are in a different school district, because as the mother of an allergic kindergartner, I was surprised by the rule, "Nothing but what the parent sent in." My son is allergic to cashews and pistachios and mango, which are not often found in treats for kindergartners, but whether the family sends in cupcakes or muffins, which have to be nut-free by default, my son gets none. He's a stoic, but still -- if you have an Epi-Pen prescription, you may not eat anything your parents did not send in.
Wow. That's intense. Our school does have a policy for snacks and bday treats. I usually send the kids in with an apple or banana for a mid-day snack. And for bdays it's always homemade w/o nuts. But than again, I live deep in the country where everybody knows each other's social security numbers so everything is built upon trust.
Chris, I agree that your school's policy seems kind of cruel, though I can see why the school is afraid. Can you send in a cupcake on a party day, so that your son has something like a treat? It seems kind of harsh for them to say that your child can't have a party with everyone else.
OHmommy, I should clarify that the school policy is that ONLY fresh fruits and vegetables are allowed for snacks that we send in. All the kids have an afternoon snacktime, and they have to have fresh foods for it. But in the after-school program (the 3-6pm place for kids whose parents work), the school provides a snack for the kids. Sometimes it's mini bagels with cream cheese; sometimes it's pretzels and cheese sticks; sometimes it's cereal. But when it's cereal the kids get to choose which cereal to eat, and there are several hideous sugary choices, which I find bizarre in a school whose policies otherwise favor fresh fruit and lowfat cheese as appropriate snacks.
I KNOW they say the "store bought" only policy is because of children with allergies. But I've heard from many sources (teachers) that it has as much to do with not knowing how or where "homemade" treats are really made. Let's face it the possibility that your children's classmates "helped" with dirty hands or that the kitchens and utensils in their house were less than sterile are huge factors here. Think salmonella and e coli for a minute.
Honestly, as a teacher, my guess is that this some policy based on one bad experience or the fear of a bad experience that has become THE WAY WE DO THINGS. It's so silly.
In my district the days when kids can eat sugary stuff are called FMNV days. Food of Minimal Nutritional Value. Seriously.
Afraid of lawsuits and ready willing and able to overreact to the simplest problem. That's how I see School Boards today. It is, at its root, a predictable reaction to our over-litigious society.
When I was in school it was awesome to have your parents bring a treat for the classroom, no matter what it was. My brothers always brought in treats, I think my mom was able to make things. (and hello, making things is ofter far cheaper than buying them)
I think that the school doesn't want to be liable if a child has an allergic reaction. I guess I can understand where they are coming from but by God, homemade is better than high fructose corn syrup any day!
I'm a total scrooge on this issue, I don't think toddler and preschool age children should be receiving treats at school AT ALL. I agree 100% the portions are oversized, the number they eat are often unregulated, there is NO value and if I want to give a small treat, I want to do it at home. Besides there are 1000s of birthdays in a class during the year; why not a special hat and a song, why the nasty fake food?
Okay, I warned you I was a scrooge.
Birthday treats at our school are highly discouraged. Not just because of food allergies--and trust me we have more than our fair share where I teach--but mostly because the State of Pennsylvania has now implemented "Nutrition Standards" for our schools that basically lay out how many times during the year the students are supposed to have "sugary treats". And they're treated like the school test scores where it's supposed to decrease each year.
This is all a reaction to the rising number of children with childhood obesity Basically, the state has decided it's the schools who are responsible for fixing the problem, and that problem is obviously that once a month birthday cupcake. (And not at all the fact that they all go home and play video games and watch TV and eat McDonalds after school!)
Boo's kinder required store bought, but at the time there was NOTHING store bought that catered for my sons allergies. (ironic?)
So I had to do a food handling course and get ACCREDITED to be able to cook for the kinder so I could bring a damn cake for his birthday.
If that doesn't make me mother of the freaking year NOTHING will!
(can you tell I am still bitter 4 years later?)
As a parent of a child with a chronic illness that makes them suseptible to all bacteria, germs and molds: staph on the desks everywhere, pseudomonas and aspergillus in the water, molds in dust, I can tell you first hand that the food handling practices that I have seen at school would not pass food safety standards by the health department. We have had 3 surgeries by age 8 for staph related sinus infections, and spent the past summer on iv's and inhaled meds and antibiotics that are banned for use in children because of the toxity. (his illness causes an exception).
Last year a classmate returned from over a week off from strep, passed out treats while his brother was still home from school with strep, and my son was sick with strep three days later.
Last year at the class picnic, the popsicles were in a cooler that was rimmed with dirt. Dirt is the single most dangerous bacteria for my son. Once he is infected he will be fighting it off for life and there are no antibiotics to eradicate it. First I had to tell my crying child that he couldn't have a popsicle, then I cleaned it with several antibacterial wipes, and cleaned the scissors that were laying in the dirt, from the classroom, that had been brought in for this purpose.
It does put me in a difficult position as a parent, as the other parents are so accustomed to the normalcy of parties and I feel like I am fighting for my son's life when they have them.
His illness was more manageable prior to school. Cleaning surfaces, hand sanitizer after public places, no tap water, and he did not have an infection with any serious bacteria.
We have been accused of "over-worry" because we do not tell others what his illness is, but have asked for wrapped and prepackages snacks so that we know that some food safety rules are in place. I explained to a mom that he had a medical condition that made all bacteria an issue for him. This had no effect.
It is very stressful to think that an impromtu homeade treat could put us in the hospital. I am getting tired of the scoffing and hostility by the other moms. If the school can have a teacher or assistant assigned to a child who is learning disabled, I don't know why it can't make policies to keep my child safe. Yes, I want him to have normal experiences, but there is nothing normal about having iv's in your arm for 3 weeks over summer break, or a hospitalization.
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