Parents in the hot seat for children’s poor lunch choices Loop Barbados

Black Immigrant Daily News

Parents are being called out as a guidance counsellor and a nutritionist critique trash choices students have for lunch while at school.

One guidance counsellor who is also a registered counselling psychologist Shaunt?e Walters said that students can only work with what they can afford when it comes to the canteen. “I think we need to not just look at psycho-education and teaching the students to make healthy lifestyle choices, but we also need to work at changing the choices….changing the choices that they have, the options when it comes to the canteens, when it comes to the vendors on the school compound, because if you’re hungry and you only have three or four things to choose from, you will choose three or four things.”

It comes down to the communities that they come from and the socioeconomic group

And she said that parents must take a significant portion of the blame for what students choose from the menu on the daily basis.

“It is quite difficult in the school setting to address what the students are eating given the fact that in a lot of cases the parents are the ones who are supplying what they are eating.

“So when we say to students when you go to the canteen or when you have to buy lunch you have to choose some of the healthier things, ‘You can’t just have chips and ketchup every day, chips and ketchup, chips and ketchup. You can’t have fried chicken for breakfast every day. It is not healthy.’

“Then they say, ‘But this is what I have’; ‘This is what is available at the canteen’; ‘Ths is what my mummy told me to buy’; or ‘This is what I have money to get’.”

However, she admitted that getting to a healthier place seems to be the goal and “a work in progress” but, “it will take some time.

“We’re not just changing the culture at the school, but we’re going to need to change the culture in the homes, in communities, in the fast food world, but if each of us puts our hands to the plough, I believe it can be done.”

Supporting this stance as well, as she spoke about some poor lunch choice differences and similarities between school-age girls and boys, Public Health Nutritionist Nicole Griffith added, “It comes down to the communities that they come from and the socioeconomic groups, and I know people don’t like to hear that but it is truthful.”

She said that children from the lower socioeconomic classes are not arriving at school with water, occasional fruit juice and packed lunches. Instead, they have money and it’s either enough or they pool funds together with other kids and then have to resort to the canteen options. “So then obviously the choices they may have to choose from are not always the best because they don’t have that many options to choose from.”

They were speaking on a panel discussion on Healthy Living as part of Education Month. It was conducted via Zoom.

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