Mom Claps Back at Daughter's Teacher After She Shamed Her Eating Habits
"Evelyn has our permission to eat lunch in any order she chooses. None of her foods are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ — they are just food!"
Published Feb. 29 2024, 5:18 p.m. ET
Any parent can attest to how difficult it is to feed a kid. One day they only want green things, the next day they won’t consider anything green. Sometimes they want all cold food. Sometimes it’s all hot food. Preferences wane and what’s beloved can be hated without rhyme or reason.
The TikTok account @pezzi.shop shared a short video featuring just a note taped to their daughter’s lunch box after the teacher potentially shamed the child's eating habits. It seems like a perfectly fine message.
Are there good foods? Are there bad foods?
After being told, at least according to a 3-year-old, that the teacher told her she needed to eat non-dessert foods first, a couple of very patient parents left a note for their daughter’s teacher taped to the top of the preschooler's lunch box.
The note reads, “Hi! Evelyn has our permission to eat lunch in any order she chooses. None of her foods are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ — they are just food! Thanks! Caroline and Joey”
Seems like a reasonable message. When you read the story behind why they wrote the note, it’s a bit frustrating. From all perspectives this is frustrating.
The meat of the story is in the video description. “Here’s the story: My three-year-old came home from school yesterday, telling me that her teacher told her that she had to eat all of her 'good' foods before she ate her 'bad' foods. She couldn’t have her cookie before eating her sandwich and cucumbers,” writes the parent.
They continue, “I am so proud that she had sensed something was off — to know that was not right enough to tell me about it. We talk about it all the time at home… If you only eat carrots and broccoli your body won’t have enough protein it needs to grow strong muscles. If you only eat chicken, your body won’t have enough energy to do things like run and play all day long."
"We need little bits of everything to make sure what we are able to learn and play and grow all day long," the parent continued in the video's description.
There aren’t good foods or bad foods but there are anytime foods and sometimes foods.
The parents are not wrong. Even on Sesame Street the monsters and humans no longer say whether a food is good or bad. Foods are now a sometimes food or an anytime food. Cookies, for example, are a sometimes food. This is coming from the Cookie Monster, a monster whose entire purpose is to eat cookies.
But the teacher may not be wrong either. We’re not spending the day with these 3 and 4-year-olds, an age group full of notoriously horrible eaters.
Unlike most viral TikTok videos, this one does not allow comments, suggesting the parents didn't want their methods of parenting to be up for debate.
It’s probably for the best. One of the most difficult jobs in the world is being a preschool teacher and one of the most difficult responsibilities in the world is being a parent of a preschooler. There are no winners. Maybe everyone just needs a cookie.
