My parents always took the teacher’s side. I grew up attending public schools in the Chicagoland area and I can count on two fingers the number of times (out of hundreds of opportunities) that my Mom and Dad thought a teacher had gone too far. Today, by contrast, teachers routinely face obnoxious, know-it-all parents who refuse to believe that their children could be a problem in the classroom.

But teachers, principals and school administrators are not infallible. And on those occasions when they do overreach in their roles as temporary caretakers of our children, they deserve to be put in their place.

From Goodhousekeeping.com:

In Australia, a mom sent her three-year-old to kindergarten with a slice of chocolate cake in the lunch bag. Unfortunately, a slice of this kind falls within the school’s “Red Food Category,” which encompasses unhealthy foods “that may contain excess energy (kilojoules), saturated fat, added sugar and/or salt.” The list also includes sodas and deep-fried foods and is part of a full set of nutrition guidelines that all schools follow Down Under.

The article continues:

A friend of the officially-warned mother, Melinda Tankard Reist, who is also an author and advocate for women and girls, took to Facebook to back up her pal. Her post clearly hit a nerve, with more than 600 comments to date.

An Australian mom sends a piece of cake with her daughter as part of that day’s school lunch. The school responds by scolding the mom for violating nutritional guidelines. The mom’s friend posts about it on Facebook. And now we’re discussing it because major media outlets around the world have taken up the cause of cake-loving children everywhere.

 

 

Perhaps social media can have a positive impact on the world!

According to the family friend of this mom and her daughter, the mother in question is a healthy person who has given birth to (and raised) eight healthy children. I come from a family of six siblings, but you do not have to hail from a large family to know that any woman who can put up with that many kids is a saint and should be granted a “Get out of ‘condescending notes from teachers’ jail free” card for life. Unless there had been repeated examples of this mother abusing or neglecting her children, everyone should just back off.

One of the two times that my own mother called a teacher back to tell her that she should mind her own business was when I brought a meatball hoagie to school for that day’s “fruit snack”—a mid-morning treat designed to keep second graders from getting crabby before lunchtime. Due to my ancient Viking/Nordic blood, I was the tallest kid in my class and already looked like a fifth grader. I was fit and active for my age, and that morning two of my younger siblings had been puking their brains out and my mom did not have time to stop at the store to pick up whatever pretentious fruit my second grade teacher tended to favor in her own grocery cart. On my way out the door that morning, my Mom said, “Eat half of your meatball sandwich for Fruit Snack if you are hungry and the rest at lunch.”  When I came home that afternoon with a note from my teacher about my lack of a fruit snack, my Mom told my single, eco-friendly, 25-year-old teacher in no uncertain terms to keep her opinions to herself.

As Abby W. Schachter has noted in her book, No Child Left Alone: Getting the Government Out of Parenting, the rapid rise in unelected “experts” telling parents how they should raise, feed and educate their children is alarming. There is a balance to be struck between social engineering and anarchy, but in modern America we’re much closer to the former than the latter. This is why we ought to be vigilant about the encroaching busybodies who, as my wife and I learned last year in the months leading up to the birth of our first child, are only too happy to give unsought advice with the certainty and demeanor of a Soviet-era commissar.

I, for one, am glad that Melinda Tankard Reist posted something on Facebook about this Great Chocolate Cake Caper. Just like we need to teach our kids respect for governing authorities such as teachers and police officers, we also need to point out silly infringements of personal freedoms and laugh heartily at them so that our kids learn how to navigate an increasingly confusing society.

This blog post has been reproduced with the permission of Acculturated. The original blog post can be found here.

[Image Credit: Melinda Tankard Reist]