15 Comments
Jan 18, 2022Liked by Virginia Sole-Smith

I have worked SO hard on this with my kids, and felt really undermined when my preschooler came home one day, having had a lesson on "healthy eating", and told me all about the unhealthy foods we shouldn't eat. The school also monitors how they eat their lunch and won't let them eat their "treat" until everything else has been eaten. I'm hoping that my consistent work at home will win through, but I do feel frustrated. And I thought Grandma and her "naughty chocolates" where my main problem!

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Jan 18, 2022Liked by Virginia Sole-Smith

I've been thinking about diet culture and school a lot since my kid settled into kindergarten. Two things are currently concerning me: one is that there's a problematic level of enforcement of eating the vegetables and fruit that come in the school lunches. My kid doesn't like mushy vegetables, which the school vegetables are, and as a result he will often get the cheese sandwich alternative even to a lunch he otherwise likes because he doesn't want to eat the vegetables. And on the one day a week he gets home lunch, he has asked me to not send a sandwich because he is made to finish that before he can eat his granola bar, and he doesn't always have time. (We have compromised with 1/4 of a sandwich in addition to his [crunchy] vegetable slices and turkey pepperoni.)

The other thing is he has become aware of fatness as a disfavored category, and commented on it a few times, and I have to assume it's coming from school -- presumably from the other kids since I don't imagine his teacher explicitly calling anyone fat.

The former I feel like we might need to talk to his teacher about at some point, but it does feel like an uncomfortable level of telling her how to manage the classroom, and I don't know to what degree this is a formal policy and to what degree it's the initiative of the para who is the one enforcing this.

But boy, if they sent home a BMI report card the entire school district management would be hearing from me.

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Jan 18, 2022Liked by Virginia Sole-Smith

Last year during virtual learning, I was shocked to hear the lessons about “bad foods” from my 1st grader’s physical education teacher. Even a year later, he often checks the calories on foods he eats. 🤦‍♀️

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Jan 18, 2022Liked by Virginia Sole-Smith

Ahhhh what timing! I am working on the literature review for my thesis, which is on this exact topic! This post will be an excellent place to jump off from. Thank you!

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Jan 18, 2022Liked by Virginia Sole-Smith

Thank you in particular for the Cait O'Conner post which mentions how the desks/chairs/layout of classrooms are also part of this. It is unreasonably difficult to get schools to move away from furniture that simply doesn't work for a lot of students--and plays into other sorts of body normatively as well.

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deletedJan 19, 2022Liked by Virginia Sole-Smith
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