Two years ago, when my daughter Naomi was in kindergarten, she plunked her Hello Kitty lunch box on the kitchen counter and announced, “Mom, I am the only kid in my class who makes their own lunch.”
“Oh, that can't be true,” I said, as my three oldest buzzed around the kitchen after supper, pulling out vegetables and sandwich meat and fruit to make their lunches for the next day.
“But it is true, Mama!” she said. “I asked everyone today, and they all said their mom or dad made their lunch.”
I’m not surprised my children are in the minority when it comes to making their own lunches. Many parents I speak to are bemused my kids make their own.
But I am shocked we’ve gotten to a point where it is considered normal for mom or dad to do this small chore for their kids. I even know parents of high-schoolers and university students who still do this.
I am begging you, for the love of all sanity and sense, to stop it. Stop making your kid’s school lunch. Stop making twee bento lunches where the crusts are cut off with heart-shaped cookie cutters. Stop Facebooking and tweeting and pinning artfully lit and shot pictures of your kid’s perfectly sliced apples and broccoli next to the homemade Greek yogurt dip. Stop judging your worth as a parent by how well you cater your tiny executive’s lunch time.
I am not saying you shouldn’t ensure your kid has a healthy and filling lunch, with veggies and fruit and protein in there. We have rules about what our kids are allowed to pack for lunch: one serving of fruit, one to two servings of veggies, a main entree, and a small treat.
And I am not saying you can’t help your kids, or give suggestions. Go ahead and get out the cookie-cutters together. Teach your child how you make that amazing dip.
What I am saying is you are not running a restaurant, and your child is not the customer. Packing the perfect lunch is not your job. Your job is to produce a functioning, fairly independent adult with as many basic life skills as that adult is capable of by about age 20.
I know many parents like to show their child their love through the lunch-box offering. For others, parental pride plays a large part. I get both of these feelings. I like to send my kids with the homemade cookies and the love notes sometimes too, snuck in after they make their lunch.
Making their own lunch, though, is an excellent opportunity to teach your kids about four life skills at the same time: proper nutrition, planning ahead, self-sufficiency, and taking responsibility (they have no one to blame if they don’t like their lunch the next day.)
In most cases, if you still make your child’s lunch by Grade 4, you are missing that opportunity, and you may be cheating your kid of life experiences he or she is going to need later on when out discovering the world.
In my second year of university, I was a university-residence fellow (also known as a don or an RA). Some of the residents on my floor were from the first generation of children raised by helicopter parents. These legal adults could not do their own laundry, clean their residence rooms or cook a basic meal. They were smart enough to get into university, but struggled with basic life skills: Mom and dad had always done it.
Parenting is hard enough and busy enough. You don’t need this extra chore. Your kid won’t starve or get scurvy. If we all let our kids make lunch, this is one less perfect parent competition we all have to endure.
Let it go.
