What to do about it? People are much less sure about the answer to that question! I read a blog that said that there was very little surprise in it, and it makes sense. How many of us think we have issues around food, yet very few of us have felt real, genuine hunger- the kind that overrides your conscious thought. Well it seems this hunger gets right down into the basic circuitry of little ones.
It means that four years later we still have food-smuggling issues, particularly around sweets. Again, this makes sense because imagine living on white bread, coke and lollies for six years then WHAM- cold turkey! Or as my lovely husband put it, "Imagine if someone told you that you had to do without coffee from now on..."
We have made huge gains on this. Most days we don't encounter issues at all. We have spent time working on honesty. Our kids garden and help cook to take ownership of healthy food. They enjoy and try some pretty strange food items, and are so much better about food these days.
Nevertheless, there are days when these food-smuggling scenes are incredibly trying. Today is one. Among other smuggled things, we discovered one of our girls' new, mandatory, $85 school bag had gum sticking the insides together. She'd found the gum on a bus seat, and well, now it is going to be with us for a very long time!
Well, these are only material things, I suppose. It's more about the social lack of cred for eating scunge off the bus seats. That's the sort of thing that can hang around you for a long time in a school career.
So the question is, how do we help our kids be safer? How do we protect them from themselves? It's the bittersweet situation of school aged kids, I suppose. We send them off to be on a bus with big kids, schooled by people we barely know and just hope, fingers crossed, that they are not going to catch hepatitis from some bus seat gum. What are the odds, right?
image from "Things that are Sticky" http://thingsthataresticky.blogspot.com/2008/08/gum-on-bus-seat-back.html
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