School Lunches

Feeding a child is a basic parental responsibility – yet the federal government has increasingly taken over this role. School children can now get breakfast, lunch and dinner at school, while some schools even provide summer feeding programs.

Unfortunately, this is precisely the wrong solution if we want healthy kids. The newest research on childhood obesity finds that children are at a lower risk for obesity if their parents take a greater role in their nutrition. Children who eat dinner with their families, get adequate sleep at night, and watch less television are much healthier than kids who don’t practice these three simple steps.

Despite this research, in 2010, billions of dollars were added to the already wasteful and fraudulent federal school lunch program. Adding money to an already broken system won’t do anything to help make our kids healthier. The only real solution is to encourage greater parental responsibility over a child’s food needs. This will reduce the number of children currently (and unnecessarily) enrolled in the school lunch program so that taxpayer dollars can be directed to only those families who truly need assistance in feeding their children.