20% of school kids malnourished...

AHarvey said:
Personally, when I was a child at primary school we had 2 large areas set aside, one for a wildlife area/pond and the other was a large vegetable patch where we used to go out and learn about growing veggies and they would then be used in the canteen.

I can't see why schools can't be doing this sort of thing again.

We all know there are rubbish parents in the country, we need to be doing as much as possible at schools to help out while trying to educate the kids and parents.
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And this could have been facilitated if previous governments had not created an environment where schools were placed in the position where they needed to sell their "green" land to make ends meet.
 
I agree that this is down to the parents to make sure that a balanced diet is in place on the other side -yes I know I sound like Jamie Olivier now- the junk I see on the weekly school menu is also not really setting a good example either.

I also like the fact that the school of my little girl doesn't allow sweets to be taken into school but then miserably fails to police/enforce it with the parents judging by other kids lunch boxes....love the discussions at home "Why do i have carrot sticks when <enter name here> has always chocolate cookies etc...whinge,whinge,whinge."
 
I think a lot of it may genuinely be ignorance about nutrition. It can be quite a complicated topic and with so much convenience food around people seem to rely on to simply provide the required nutrition without the knowledge to make their own judgements.

I don't know if I can blame them entirely, but on the other hand all the information is more accessible than ever with the internet. So we are potentially in a better position than what went before, which was presumably handing down cookery knowledge/recipes that were at least mostly based on 'real' ingredients but not necessarily ideal nutritionally.
 
realBabelfish said:
just been on radio2 (jeremy vine) that 1 in 5 school kids arent being fed enough.

clearly for a 'developed' country this is inexcusable.

what should be done?

cancel oversees aid? etc.

your thoughts.

(i know there will lots of 'let the scroungers die' from the right wing nutters we have but a lot of people are struggling at the moment)
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Listening to Jeremy Vine today, i think one of the things that needs to be stopped is muppetry.
His final piece was should people get days off when their pet died, paid days off work. So... lets have the kids starving, but give the parents days off wrok as rover has died. Made a mockery of the first report by following it with a debate built around utter twaddle.
Very unimpressed with Vine today.

I don't believe the initial reports figures either.
Money wasted on tv phone drink and cigs should be excluded from any survey as it is all money that could be spent on food.
 
Sad (but not surprising) that so many people here refuse to take their head out of the sand and take a look at what is going on in their society. Some of the stories I heard on the radio this morning are absolutely heartbreaking - mothers eating only their child's left overs, children cooking their own Christmas meal - a baked potato, long queues at charities for families to receive their one meal of the day. This shouldn't be happening in 21st century Britain, it shouldn't be happening anywhere in the world.

For anyone who wants to help:

http://www.kidsco.org.uk/
http://www.netmums.com/home/netmums-campaigns/mobiles-for-meals
 
scorza said:
Sad (but not surprising) that so many people here refuse to take their head out of the sand and take a look at what is going on in their society. Some of the stories I heard on the radio this morning are absolutely heartbreaking - mothers eating only their child's left overs, children cooking their own Christmas meal - a baked potato, long queues at charities for families to receive their one meal of the day. This shouldn't be happening in 21st century Britain, it shouldn't be happening anywhere in the world.

For anyone who wants to help:

http://www.kidsco.org.uk/
http://www.netmums.com/home/netmums-campaigns/mobiles-for-meals
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Cant i just kill people instead? /notserious
 
realBabelfish said:
you cant live very well on benefits. you can survive. maybe if you have 5 kids and feed them **** you might be able to.

its not even VERY EASY to live on average wage these days, if you want to feed your family right.
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Actually it is, its very hard to feed your family wrong though.

£3 for a box of brand Cereal, when a massive bag of porridge is WAY cheaper, lasts way longer and is way healthier.

Its consumer britain, I want to know for a fact from one of these rubbish reports, rather than CLAIM they are from poor families(no idea on this particular radio show, the story was around a few weeks ago and it was very specifically talking about poor families sending underfed kids to school, and was talking about extending free meals to lunch), I want to see a reporter get a DETAILED BREAK DOWN on what the benefits/low paid parents are spending their money on.

Life is tough on some people, it shouldn't be, but that is the way life always has been and likely always will be, so getting past that issue, its very easy to feed your family healthily cheaply. Its MUCH harder if you go to Tesco's and buy a bunch of microwave meals, or brand name cereal and coke and alcohol and cigarette's.

However as always the cheaper way to deal with this is food stamps, setting up a system with all the supermarkets so they can redeem foodstamps rather than cash and that foodstamps simply won't work on many luxury items, huge bag of rich/pasta/oats, cheap as hell on foodstamps, £2 bottles of coke, not on food stamps, tesco's own brand sugar puff's at £1.50 for a giant box, sure, brand name sugar puff's, a half size box at £3, no, etc, etc.

No one, literally no one on benefits should be allowed to smoke, the fact that people who work pay taxes which some chav can spend on cigarette's, damaging their health and increasing the tax burden through healthcare costs later in life is INSANE.

Ultimately when poor families on benefits realise the government will cave and give their kids free food, people stop feeding their kids with the money they have knowing the school will feed them instead. Why save £5 for more food for your kids, when you can send them to school, they get fed for free, and you have £5 more? it's a never ending cycle, if you cave on one meal, they'll stop giving them another till a bunch of people get together to complain till the government give their kids another meal.

Don't get me wrong, there are GENUINELY people who are in a bad state, who have increased living costs(disabled, people caring for disabled family who can't work) who have horribly unfair lives and we should do everything we can to help.

But i'm also sure that the vast majority of malnutrition in school kids is inept or selfish parents.
 
Xordium said:
Too many parents struggling to make ends meet who have neither the energy or time to devote to cooking a meal from scratch due to an economic situation that was beyond their control, their socio-economic status that they were born into which was beyond their control, and their specific job which quite often can be beyond their control. Try actually putting yourself in their shoes and what they have to cope with and you may develop this remarkable little thing called empathy.

On one hand you could have a young-single mother who rarely gives her child breakfast, spends little time on promoting early learning or pushes social interaction and on the other hand you have a young mother who has a partner in Afghanistan and is trying to hold the fort together with working shift patterns and using whatever childcare she can afford. Really depends how you look at the particular situation - it's the same person though.
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Empathy for a tough life is one thing, I always had it but as I get older I see the way the super rich operate as being out of this world sickening(while I genuinely think 95% of other people hope to be that rich and would act the exact same way if they became rich), failing to be a parent because your life is tough isn't empathy, thats excusing.

THe vast majority of the planet ALWAYS had to work stupidly hard, dawn till dusk, many people from earlier than that till later, back breaking work and they still made meals and did more when they got home. For a large portion of the planet, time for things other than work is simply a dream, not a reality.

While you can't predict the future, losing jobs and what might happen, quite a lot of people have kids despite knowing they will have a very tough time financially. A decent portion of people can be more careful, a decent portion of people will fall on tough times later on in life and have to cope, I can have empathy for them all, that doesn't mean I can excuse it when they aren't forfilling their parental responsibilities.

However I'm also not completely obtuse, this day and age, not a third world country, how can we let this happen, all that nonsense.

In every country, from the dawn of time till the end of time we won't have equality, every kid won't be brought up the same, everyone won't have the same amount of money or happiness or food. 60million + people live in the UK, there is no significant or real way to ensure the health and safety of everyone who lives in this country, anyone who thinks its possible is living in cloud cuckoo land. While it would be great, life simply isn't great, won't ever be great and has never been great. Life is hard, everyone dies, lots of people die before is "fair". Some kids get cancer, some end up in a rotten situation, abusive parents, poor parents, parents in jail, you can't fix everything its literally impossible. Be sad, have empathy but cut out the hyperbole of being unable to believe it can happen in this day and age, why on earth can't it happen?

Again there has always been, and their always will be bad parents. What is it, do we want licences for kids, do we want parenting lessons, what will force people to be good with their kids. Throw free food at every kid in the country, you'd end up with a lot of fat kids, and the country can't afford it.

Taking kids off bad parents or poor parents, what would the legislation be, how would you be certain that no kid was ever removed from a perfectly fine home because of a crappy neighbour who didn't like kids making a complaint that ends up with a kid in care. How are kids homes in this country, adoption and fostering, mostly terrible. There is no solution, would be great if there was, there isn't.
 
drunkenmaster said:
Its consumer britain, I want to know for a fact from one of these rubbish reports, rather than CLAIM they are from poor families(no idea on this particular radio show, the story was around a few weeks ago and it was very specifically talking about poor families sending underfed kids to school, and was talking about extending free meals to lunch), I want to see a reporter get a DETAILED BREAK DOWN on what the benefits/low paid parents are spending their money on.
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Taking this idea a step further, why not have the benefits loaded on to a debit card and do Tesco-style monitoring of what people actually buy?
Hell, you could probably even buy in Tesco's expertise to help.
The government could get an accurate idea of how the money is actually being spent and maybe even arrange discounts with certain retailers on various items for these cards?

There should be community courses in nutrition (well, more about how to cook from scratch) and how to manage your money. This would require not giving taxpayer's money away for free and actually helping people though, so I'm not sure any politician would support it.
 
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grimm said:
I'm not really sure how this is happening. These families obviously receive benefits money enough to buy food etc.
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I know plenty of kids from well off families that aren't eating the right foods.
 
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