In the kitchen after school, my daughter Ada frowned as I plated up the pasta I’d made for dinner. ‘Mummy, is there sugar in this?’ she said.
This wasn’t the first time she’d asked me this question – just a few weeks earlier she refused fruit when I had to answer ‘yes, it has sugar in it’ – and I doubt it will be the last.
She’s only five years old and, despite my best attempts, she’s begun to talk like a dieter.
‘I can only eat healthy foods,’ she says. ‘School said so.’ And I hate how familiar it all feels.
As a woman born in the Nineties, I grew up during the peak of diet culture. The cupboards in my family’s kitchen were lined with SlimFast milkshakes, and the only ‘cookbooks’ on the shelves were about Atkins.
School friends talked about diets, and shared diet pills with me at lunchtime. I believed carbs were evil and I’d memorised the calorie content of dozens of foods to the point that I could practically recite them like a party trick.
I still can’t look at a packet of Walker’s crisps without compulsively chanting the calorie content of the different flavours in my head.
At the time my friends loved it and even I was proud of it. Now, I see it for what it truly was – a toxic relationship with food. Or even, disordered eating.
I never wanted my daughter to repeat this pattern. It’s why, from the moment she was born, I’ve been very careful about the way I speak about body image, my own body, and food.
Where before I might complain about my weight, or what size jeans a store decided my body was – now I don’t. Women in my family did the same thing when I was a teenager and it left me wondering if they hate their body – which looked like mine – did I have to hate mine too?
I’ve even corrected family members who contradict this messaging – like when they say ‘if you eat your dinner, you can have a treat afterwards’. I always tell them there’s no connection, because, although it seems like a harmless way to encourage a kid to eat vegetables, it actually frames one as ‘bad’ and one as ‘good’.
I want her to know that everything is fine, in moderation. That food is not good or bad, and eating it does not make you good or bad. That she is inherently deserving of food, and she does not need to ‘earn’ it.
But what a waste of time it’s all been, when her school is apparently undoing all my hard work.
Earlier this year, Ada took a slice of homemade Victoria sponge cake to school with her. We’d made it the night before together in what was a lovely bonding activity between a mother and child and we were both proud of our finished work.
When she got home from school that day, I asked her if she’d enjoyed it. Glumly, she replied: ‘They took it off me.’
A teacher removed my child’s food from her lunchbox as it wasn’t the ‘right’ food.
I was furious, in complete disbelief, and Ada, who just 24 hours earlier had been beaming with pride at her creation, now looked positively sheepish and embarrassed.
Ever since then, the queries have come in thick and fast from my child about whether or not something has sugar in it, and a refusal to eat it if it’s ‘wrong’ – which has taken a lot of patience, consistency, and explaining to correct.
When I spoke to her teacher about this incident – explaining it was homemade, that there were no colourings or additives, or anything artificial in it – I asked why, as Ada had plenty of ‘healthy’ snacks in addition to this ‘treat’, it was such a big deal to allow her one thin slice of sponge and jam we’d made together?
But the teacher was very noncommittal in her response. She simply said: ‘Cake isn’t allowed’. I couldn’t believe it.
Schools are always the first to break their own rules. Sponge cake features on the school dinner menu on a weekly basis – is that freshly baked in the canteen every morning? I doubt it.
And every school fundraiser and fete I’ve attended has seen cakes, bags of sweets, fizzy drinks, even booze sold and consumed on site all in the name of fundraising.
At the end of term, Ada told me how her class were rewarded for ‘good behaviour’ throughout the academic year with ice lollies. So what message are we really sending our kids?
That it’s OK to have certain foods because they’ve ‘earned’ them? That things like cake are fine so long as it was whipped up in the school canteen instead of at home?
All this mixed messaging is enough to leave me feeling confused and exasperated, so I can only imagine how unsettling it must be for a five-year-old.
That’s why I think these kinds of messages about healthy eating in school should wait until later, when children have the ability to process them. Because a five-year-old worrying about sugar intake isn’t a sign of nutritional awareness; it’s a red flag about anxiety, restriction, and distorted messages around food.
Yes, schools have a duty to teach kids about healthy eating, but policing and confiscating foods is an overreaction. If teachers have concerns over what pupils are eating, it would be better for them to bring the issue to the parents responsible, not the children.
Because the only way to ensure our children grow up with a healthy relationship with food is if we work together, not against one another. Until we can find a way to do that effectively, I suggest you leave my child’s lunchbox alone.
Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing jess.austin@metro.co.uk.
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