School Lunch Dessert First/Last

let them be kids! If you try to implement a rule like this, it's just going to have the kids either throwing away their lunch or giving it to a friend. In the end, you're teaching them subterfuge & not healthy eating habits.

Why serve dessert at all?

But if you must serve dessert, I would make it fruit, or a vanilla pudding with fruit mixed in.

Good idea in theory, but hard to implement.

When I was a teacher, the policy was that kids had to have 3 items (not counting desert). One of them had to be an entre/sandwich. (Kids had a lot of choice). Even with all the choices, there was a lot of food thrown out! As long as the desert is small (which usually it is, like a small cup of pudding or small piece of cake or one cookie) it's not going to matter whether kids eat it first or not. I've seen plenty of kids set it aside till after (and taught my own kids, though they don't always do it). But if you don't serve them dessert till they've eaten their other food, you could easily end up with a lot more food in the trash and then hungry kids, because they've chuck the good stuff to get to dessert quickly.

I have two answers:

1. By giving the dessert as a reward for eating other food, you are teaching kids that the other food is not desirable in and of itself. It is something that must be endured in order to get dessert.
2. What is in the desserts that make them so unhealthy? There is very little difference between a muffin and a cupcake, yet one is "healthy" and one is "dessert". Frozen yogurt or ice cream can even be considered healthy if all the ingredients are real. I think your better bet would be to take on the desserts; make them tasty and healthy for the kids.

Lunch time is one of the only times during a day that a kid has complete control over what he does/what he eats. Leave them alone. If a kid wants to eat dessert first, let them. I understand wanting to encourage healthy habits, but being controlling about dessert isn't the way to go.

As a daughter of a lunch lady I can tell you they are given very little time to serve children in order for the child to eat. Unless your district is willing to pay these hard working ladies for more hours to serv you child I think you should re-evaluate your requests. Most people complain about their lunch programs, and usually blame the lunch ladies. Having seen the inside these ladies are given very little time to prepare, serve and clean up. My mom worked when they actually cooked meals and retired this year as they cut their hours so they had to start serving pre-prepared heat and serve junk food. This was not the lunch ladies decission, and they don't have any say. Also keep in mind how much time your kids have for a lunch break, there may not be time to eat lunch then serve dessert no matter what the lunch lady wants.

Hi, Jennifer--
I've been thinking about your post all weekend. Congrats on being proactive about spearheading some healthy changes in your school's lunch program!
I have to say, though, that I would not support a rule about eating to "earn" a dessert. I struggled with food issues while I was in high school, and since then I have learned a lot about psychological issues related to eating and food. A "clean plate" rule or anything similar to it undermines a child's sense of control (which is so limited anyway) and also devalues the rest of the food on his plate. The child thinks, "If I have to eat all this stuff to get the treat, then this stuff must be *really* crappy!" Any kind of earning an unhealthy food treat makes healthy food all the more unappealing.
If we teach children that food is simply fuel for our bodies and we need to choose the best fuel for the best results, and some fuel is good to eat often and some fuel is only for once in awhile, then the value of everything on the lunch tray becomes neutral and the child can choose what s/he wants to eat, the order it will be eaten, and how much will be eaten. Don't you sometimes want two sandwiches, and other days just half a sandwich? It's OK to teach children to listen to their stomachs and learn to obey their satiety signals when they are full. It's the habit of ignoring fullness and continuing to eat beyond fullness that leads to obesity.
At the Head Start program, the students eat "family style" and pass around dishes of food and take some to put on their plates. It is against Head Start policy to use any kind of food as a reward or prize (because it fosters unhealthy attitudes about food) and students do not have to eat anything they do not want to eat. All meal items (which often includes a small cookie or other dessert item) is served at the same time and is on the plate together. The only rule is students must take at least one of everything. My friends who are Head Start teachers say the first couple of weeks of the school year, the children take only one teeny bit of the unfamiliar items--often only a single pea!-- and then eat just their cookie. As they get familiar with the routine, they realize that won't be enough, they are still hungry, and the vegetables are not so weird after all, and they start taking more. By then end of the year, nearly all the kids eat appropriate portions of nearly all the foods offered, although of course everyone has their favorites and un-favorites on different days. This sounds like a healthy food program to me.
Two changes I would whole-heartedly support are: offering more wholesome desserts, such as more fresh fruit or whole-grain muffins instead of cakes and cookies; and serving lunch AFTER recess. Many chidlren rush through lunch and gobble just a couple things so they have time to go play--I don't think students should have to choose between eating well and playing, since both are important to healthy development and academic performance. I know there are several studies on this. Have you read "Don't Eat This Book" by Morgan Spurlock or "Lunch Lessons"? The second is written by a couple of school district food service experts and contains lots of great info for people hoping to make healthy changes. I highly recommend both books!There's also a book for children by Dr. William Sears and Martha Sears that is excellent and likens different foods to a traffic signal--some food is "green light" food, some is "yellow light" for once in awhile and some get a red light because it's never a good choice. I think that book is called "Healthy Food, Healthy Kids," or something similar.
My sincerest best wishes!

My Mom works in a school cafeteria and I just don't see how this would work - a good idea but time wise it would be hard to put in place. Also, I don't know about other schools, but at her's true desserts (cake, cookie, etc.) are only served on special occasions like major holidays and ocassionaly in between - not an everyday occurance. Maybe that is the path to look at, swapping out desserts for other healthier options and keeping fun desserts for special days during the school year.

one of the elementary schools I went to made us eat everything on our trays before we could go out to recess. we ended up with lots of food fights and kids just playing in the lunch room getting sent to the principals office. we also became very good at hiding food in our pockets or sticking it up under the table...gross...
I think that if you are going to try to revamp anything it would be to have healthier desserts--
just a thought for you on how kids might respond to having to eat something first etc. kids are really really creative--
if parents are really concerned about the dessert issue they can pack lunches for their kids and not include a dessert--

My vote would be to eliminate dessert (kids don't need it) and direct the money towards healthier food.

If you make the kids wait to get their dessert, two things may happen: 1) kids get the idea that one kind of food (dessert) is more special than all the others because you have to do something extra to get it, and 2) you force kids to eat a certain quantitity of food when they may or may not be hungry, forcing them to overeat to 'eat enough' based on a grownups idea of what 'enough' is. When kids say they are not hungry and are forced to eat, it over-rides the centers in their brain that tell them they are full and they become less sensitive to it, tending to overeat in the future.

My two cents. :)

Noble idea, but I think it wouldn't be practical to implement and enforce. I don't know how much you can control what actually gets served, but I think the better way to go would be to have healthier desserts so it doesn't matter if they eat it first (pudding at least has calcium, right?), or to make the dessert so small that it doesn't take any room in their tummies, or don't even bother with dessert. My kids recently got into the mode that they thought they needed a dessert every night before bed. It would be bedtime and they'd say, "What about dessert?!" I finally had to tell them that even though dessert is nice sometimes, it's not a healthy habit to think you HAVE to have a dessert every night. Same with lunch--really, do they HAVE to have a sweet dessert?

But I have to say dessert once in a while IS nice. I pack my son's lunch most of the time, and the most he gets for dessert is an occasional pudding or rice crispie treat. But my son's school has a weird rule about candy/dessert that I'd like to see changed, personally. I tried putting in a little hershey kiss or tiny mini candy bar for a special "I love you" a few times, and he always came home with it saying no candy was allowed--unless it was part of one of those Lunchables that comes with a candy. How unfair is that?! Off the point a little, but anyways, good luck with your endeavor.

I don't think school lunch should even offer a dessert, unless it is fruit. Kids should not have dessert every single day.

I don't have any children in school yet, but I have gone to eat lunch with my neighbor's kids a few times with my neighbor when we were out and about together. At their school when a child is ready to eat their dessert they must raise their hand and get permission for the adults on duty to eat their desserts. Both those who brought their lunch and those who get the school lunch must show that they have ate most of their lunch before they can eat their dessert. There is also a no passing food to friends rule. There are some other rules I don't agree with on what they can and can't do, but I don't mind the raising their hand before they eat dessert. We make our children eat most of their meal before dessert, and they have to ask for dessert.

Also, I don't know if you caught the Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution on ABC the other night. He did go into a school and saw what kids were being served for breakfast and lunch. The show was an eye opener. I don't know how many episodes there will be, but it's something to watch or DVR if you want to do something about your school's food service.

I googled several sentences using "clean plate" because in Child Care we have been told making kids eat all or nearly all their food is one of the main causes of eating disorders. They don't get the option of saying they don't want it or that they feel full, or the option of what to eat. They don't associate eating healthy with living long and having quality of life, they associate it with being thin and popular.

So, from their point of view you would be telling them they are too fat. It also conveys they need to diet and that food is a reward. They will turn to food for comfort and may become emotional eaters. It's a bad idea all round.

We eat all summer with the free lunch program and I can honestly say that the desserts the school serves isn't all that much of a dessert. It is always something like cobbler, pudding, fresh fruit, jello or jello with fruit inside, and sometimes it's a brownie or a piece of cake.

All the following websites talk about how this isn't a good way to get kids to eat more healthy and some of them talk about how long it takes to fix children that have to eat like you are suggesting.

http://ces.uwyo.edu/PUBS/mp112-1.PDF

http://www.mirror-mirror.org/child.htm

http://www.grandparents.com/gp/content/expert-advice/fami...

This article is from the Nebraska Dept. of Education:
http://www.nde.state.ne.us/ns/caring/cleanplate.htm

Here is a link to my childs school lunch menu for the month of March.
http://ponca.ok.schoolwebpages.com/education/sctemp/2ba05...

It's kindof hard to break it up and serve lunch and then dessert. It's easiest to just give them everything at once. But I do agree with you. My daughter is not in school yet...but at home we do lunch and then she gets the dessert after she's eaten all of her healthy stuff. Otherwise...like you said she'd eat the treat and leave less room for the healthy stuff.
But if I sent her to a school that had that as a rule...I'd be all for it.

From a logistics stand point I don't think you'd be able to actually serve the dessert later than the rest of the food. No time for kids to get through the line twice.

At my children's school the teachers that monitor the lunchroom "encourage" the kids to eat the majority of their lunch first before dessert, this applies whether the child bought lunch at the school or brought their own from home. If they see a child eating a cookie and most of the sandwich is still sitting there they will say something to the child. It's explained to the child on day one along with all the other rules of the lunchroom and the kids know that they must wait on their dessert. It's certainly not 100%, but it does seem to work at our school.

Good luck,
K.

Although I am a huge health nut and work very hard to make sure my kids eat well I think it would be unreasonable to put something like this in effect. I know at my son's last school it was a miracle to get the food to everyone and rush them out the door to only get 5 to 10 minutes of recess before it was nose to the grindstone (and this was a very tiny school). I would much rather see that the school consider fruit or something of that nature as dessert rather than serve it at all.

Now all that being said, this school he went to did do something that I really appreciated. Fruit was considered the dessert and then they had a special dessert cooler that housed, different drinks, cupcakes, etc. The parents got to select at the beginning of the year if their kids could participate in these types of dessert (and they had to pay for it). I chose to let my son pick something from there on Fridays only, a little special treat at the end of the week.

Hope this helps. Good luck!

Wow, I'm surprised to hear that so many schools are apparently still serving desserts in the traditional sense. Ours usually serve fruit for the dessert with something like animal crackers being served occasionally for dessert.

I think school lunch periods are so short that it just wouldn't be possible to have desserts served separately. The kid are barely having enough time to eat before it is time to head out for recess and the next group can move through the line.

I can see the value of trying to teach healthy eating habits. But I have a different view on this. I was a teacher for over 5 years, before children. My student teaching required me to work at three different schools. I also nannied a bit and went to lunch on occasion with the kids. School lunches can be truly awful experiences. Really, just not good. There were days that I ate the pudding and ONLY the pudding because it was the only palatable thing on the plate.

The school I worked at did revamp snacks and desserts so things were healthier (soda machines were replaced with water machines, chips were replace with pop corn), that sort of thing. The kids baulked at the changes at first, but they got over it quickly.

i don't think that dessert should be eaten even every day, so it does bother me a little that schools often serve dessert with every lunch. i was going to say more, but after reading the few responses before mine, i think some of the other mammas, like cybermom3 and cynthia w. have very good points. enough said.

I like the idea, but as a past middle school teacher, it would be hard to enforce. You would have to have very exact rules and someone devoted to enforcing them. Not to mention kids are creative and can find many "interesting" ways to do away with their veggies if dessert was on the line.

A dessert rule is not going to fly unless you are volunteers are going to walk around with desserts and hand them out when the child has eaten enough of the healthy food. Teachers do not have time to watch every single child to make sure they are eating "correctly" and there is no time to go through the line a second time. The best thing you can do as a parent is reminder your child to eat a majority of their meal before the sweet/dessert (that is what my mom told me and I ate the majority of me lunch before dessert).

How about revamping the desserts, making them a bit healthier. Whole grain desserts, wheat flour used to make the desserts, strawberries with cream, and the list can go on with health desserts. That way if the dessert is eaten first at least it will be somewhat nutritional... and if kids do not like the taste because they are use to the white flour & super sweets then they will just eat the rest of the meal.

Wow......My opinion is Why do kids need a dessert after lunch? I thought dessert was more of an after dinner thing. Is there a breakfast dessert too? Everything that they are served for lunch should be healthy.

The kids barely have time to get their lunch and eat it as is. It would be chaos if they had to get in line again for dessert. Plus who would monitor that? Would they get a green go card for when they had eaten enough of their meal so that they could then go get a dessert? Our school only has 2 cafeteria monitors for 6 classes at a time. I don't see that working there.

Also, even when I pack a lunch for my son and include a dessert, it the first thing he eats. Even when I went and had lunch with him.

When I was in elementary school we had a seperate line for desserts. It didn't make us eat more of our lunch first, it just gave us less time to eat because we had to wait in 2 lines.

I think the only real option if you want a change is to not serve desserts at all.
M.