[ilbegone]

Originally Posted by Jeanfromfillmore

You're correct that most, if not all, of the food is packaged. Most of it gets thrown away by the kids anyway. But, it is the parents responsibility to provide those kids a breakfast and lunch. No one gave me a free breakfast or lunch and I managed to do ok. If the kid is old enough they can make their own lunch and breakfast. It doesn't take much to put cereal and milk in a bowl. If the parents don't buy the food with those food stamps and there isn't food available and the kids are malnourished, there's child services; that's what they're paid to do.
We need to stop enabling parents to not be parents. The schools are not their parents. It's time the responsibility be where it belongs. Like I said, I had to make my own lunch and breakfast. If I forgot, then I was the one who paid the price by being hungry. I made sure I made that tuna sandwich the next day for lunch and got up early to eat breakfast. That was how I learned to be responsible for myself. There are a lot of life lessons that are learned when you have to be responsible for yourself.

You're right, that the responsibility to feed the kids lies with the parents.

However, you can't fix the problem to what should be without addressing what is, the cultural shift which has occurred since we ourselves were children.

We have a majority of a generation and a half who were largely ignored as children and therefore ignore their own children, at least until the kids get to about 13 and then the parents try to be buddy - buddy, but then it's too late.

This is in a nutshell of why those culturally American, in addition to the English learners whose parents don't want anything to do with Americanization, fail, and why those culturally American kids go hungry.

You and I can talk all day long about how the kids should eat breakfast at home and make a brown bag lunch for school, but the reality is all many of the kids know (regardless of parental income) is that bag of chips. To fail to acknowledge that fact is to fail to arrive at a cultural solution of parental responsibility.

And I will acknowledge that the schools are part of the problem, from at least the early 1980's the schools have pushed a narcissistic self view on the kids, "you're so special" - everyone gets a trophy regardless of achievement, pushed them to call 911 if parents compel obedience, and have sought to insert "educator" dogma between the myriad beliefs of individual parents and their children. I do believe that at some level there is an idea to hook kids into being dependent on a socialist ideal and to further a socialist cause. there is the idea of "give me a child of six years old and he will be mine for life".

Let's get beyond the school lunch and think about why there are now so many school shootings - which never happened in yesteryear when kids had knives, played "cowboys and Indians" or "cops and robbers", had BB guns and 22 rifles, many hunted with shot guns and rifles, went everywhere with little fear of abduction and random child molestation and so on.

We have to address the cultural shift, otherwise the talk is meaningless.