I achieved a new record this afternoon. Between 4:00 and 5:00 today, I received 6 e-mails from the mother of one of my students regarding the amount of food he was eating (or rather, NOT eating) at lunch. I don’t mean to belittle her concern, but 6…really? The child is not wasting away. He has at least 20 minutes to eat his lunch once he gets seated. (That’s 10 more minutes than I have to eat MY lunch by the time I get my students settled, go through the lunch line with the ones that are buying, and fulfill all the requests to help open containers that my students can’t or won’t, despite my plea to parents not to send food and drink items that their children are incapable of opening on their own.). Plus, he has a 15-minute snack break later in the afternoon. He’s not short on time to eat.
It is not my fault that this child is “out to lunch,” forgive the pun. He is constantly distracted and off in a world of his own. He’s not fooling around, playing with his food, or talking to his table mates when he shouldn’t. He’s just staring off into space. He does this in class, too. I know this, because I have spent the first four weeks of school having to sit with him and his classmates at lunch, enduring the decibel-skyrocketing din, constant vibration of banging little feet against the legs of the table, and unending demands for attention. I have only just been granted the freedom to have a short break, often the only break I get all day, to eat my lunch in peace in a location of my choice (lately, my relatively quiet, darkened, and abandoned classroom at my desk). I live for those precious 10 minutes. They restore my sanity. They make me a better teacher.
But this mother thinks I should spend this time by her son’s side, making sure he eats ALL of his lunch, not just half of it, in the time he’s allotted. She informed me that in India her son’s teacher provided this service, and she thinks I should, too. I wanted so badly to remind her she is not IN India anymore. The next thing I know, she’ll be coming up to school at lunch everyday and literally spoon-feeding her son, just like some of the mothers of other Indian students we have in the building. I know it’s a cultural thing, but 5-year-old children really are capable of feeding themselves, and in my experience, if a child is hungry, s/he will eat.
This sounds very familiar. At the end of my career, there was a parent creating a huge food battle with her child as well. Despite our suggestions that a good breakfast and dinner will keep her child healthy, all of which is during her watch, she insisted we micromanage the lunchtime food intake. After realizing this micromanaging was drawing unnecessary attention to this student, while peers were watching, I stopped being a player in the ridiculous drama this parent was orchestrating.