My granddaughter is getting ready for her first day of kindergarten. She has a brand-new pink backpack covered in Disney princesses. It comes with a matching lunchbox — for which, it turns out, there’s no real need. Her new school offers free breakfast and lunch to every student. So what’s a parent to do except say thank you and take the free meals?
I think this is one of the most damaging, and least understood, government interventions in the relationship between a parent and a child.
Most school districts across the country have slowly taken on a job that used to belong to parents: feeding their kids. It started with school lunch in the 1940s. School breakfast came a couple of decades later. Afterschool snacks followed after that. And today, in a growing number of districts — including my granddaughter’s — every student gets free meals, regardless of need or family income.
These programs were sold, understandably, as filling a real need: no child should sit through a school day hungry. Good-hearted school boards and administrators voted to make sure that didn’t happen. But let’s also be real: school boards are political bodies too, and free meals for every kid poll a lot better than no meals or only some.
In came lunchrooms, cooking staff, accountants, and nutritionists. Eventually the same logic that justified lunch got applied to breakfast, then snacks — and somewhere along the way, “no child goes hungry” morphed into “school is a place where kids go to get fed.”
I take no issue with the reality that kids need to eat, whether at home or at school. Nobody should have to defend the need to feed a child. Individualized help for those children is different from making free meals the universal default.
What doesn’t get talked about is what it costs everyone once feeding kids becomes the school’s job rather than the family’s.
Start with the schools themselves. They’re supposed to educate. Now they also run a second operation entirely — commercial kitchen equipment, food-service contracts, federal nutrition rules — that competes for time, attention, and budget. Principals and superintendents trained to lead classrooms spend real energy running, essentially, a restaurant. That’s less capacity left for the thing schools actually exist to do.
But the bigger cost — the one almost nobody discusses — is what happens between parent and child.
Parents used to have to figure out how to keep their kids fed. It was just a natural consequence of being a mom or dad. They packed lunchboxes with what they had and what they could manage, and what showed up in that box said something tangible about the family behind it.
A school system that made every kid’s lunch identical was, in part, a response to that; the government decided that a child should not be singled out for being poor. That’s a judgement call. But the fix didn’t have to be replacing the lunchbox for every family.
Because packing a lunch, or making breakfast before school, isn’t just logistics. It’s one of the small, repeated ways a parent’s love and attention show up in a kid’s day — a sandwich cut a certain way, the mystery and surprise of opening a lunchbox or bag and seeing what was made for you, finding a warm and loving note from mom or dad tucked inside, breakfast at the counter before the bus comes. Many parents and grandparents recall these childhood moments with fondness, and that experience has disappeared for a lot of kids growing up now.
Once a cafeteria line takes over that moment, you don’t just save a parent twenty minutes. You remove one more place where family moments — and memories — used to form.
I’m sure a lot of parents are relieved to have this help. And they probably don’t even stop to consider it an intervention. They probably assume this is how it has always been. One less thing to worry about on a rushed morning is something to be grateful for. I don’t fault anyone for looking at it that way and taking the help. Some families still pack lunches even when free meals are on offer, but I’d guess fewer do every year — not because they love their kids any less, but because it’s hard to justify paying for something the school is handing out for free.
But it’s worth asking what we’re trading for that relief, because it’s rarely the school district paying the price.
I’ve said before that plenty of parents would also welcome a government program that dropped off clean clothes for their kids every morning and hauled away the laundry. Someone could make a compelling case for it, too — think how much more time that frees up for homework help. That’s exactly the point: there’s almost always a good-sounding reason. The question is never whether the reason sounds good. It’s what gives way once government does one more thing that used to be a family’s to do.
Every time that happens, we lose a little more of what makes a family a family — the ordinary moments at the table, making do with what you have, showing up for each other in ways no institution can replicate. None of that has to be legislated away on purpose. It just erodes, one well-meaning program at a time, unless people notice what’s happening and decide some of those moments are worth taking back because parenting is just too important to delegate away.
You are spot on again. Apply this across all of the “innocent helping ways” government intervenes and look at the mess we have created. Thanks for putting this into words every one can understand