Teacher shames mom for sending 5-year-old to school with chocolate milk

Are schools going too far in policing parents?

"There are other mothers who can’t even afford to do lunch orders and then for them to get shamed about what they’re giving their kid for recess, I just don’t like it ... It feels icky to me"

School food bans are increasingly becoming a thing—just last year, the USDA began requiring schools to get rid of junk food—and for parents, it's hard not to get on board. After all, these strict guidelines are all for your child's benefit, right? But a recent story has us wondering if they're going too far, making packing meals and snacks for our kids so restrictive it feels impossible for busy parents. According to the Mirror, an Australian working mom was shamed by her 5-year-old son's teacher for sending him to school with what many of us would consider a relatively healthy school lunchtime staple: chocolate milk.

On her radio show, The Queen Sesh, mom, blogger and clothing designer Constance Hall said she found out about the surprising rule from her son Arlo, whose teachers had forbidden him from drinking his chocolate milk during recess. "The teachers don’t let me have it. They make me have it at lunchtime because they don’t think it’s healthy enough for recess,'" Constance says her son reported.

Understandably upset—imagine how sad your kid would feel if he was made to feel bad about what his mother packed for him—Constance spoke to her son's teacher. “So I said to the teacher, really? The options are that or juice, and because he can’t have any bread or anything substantial, I give him the milk to line his tummy a bit because he’s probably hungry,” Constance said.

Not only that, the mom says she'd had to listen to "awkward" lectures from her son's teachers about proper nutrition and sending her son to school with the “worst breakfast ever,” the Mirror reports.

Constance, who works full-time and has six kids, says parents shouldn't have to be shamed for what they feed their children. "There are other mothers who can’t even afford to do lunch orders and then for them to get shamed about what they’re giving their kid for recess, I just don’t like it ... It feels icky to me.”

The mom, who often discusses the difficulty in making ends meet as a parent in her blog Like a Queen, also says that when she was at her lowest, was living on her own and had twin babies, she couldn't afford to order lunch or get to the supermarket. "Imagine if someone turned around and said to me, ‘Yeah, your son’s not allowed to have choc milk at recess because it’s not healthy enough.’ I would have burst into tears and gone straight to my psychologist and hyperventilated the whole way there."

Besides embarrassing parents, who may be struggling to buy food for their families, the rule seems pretty arbitrary. Why is chocolate milk OK during lunch, but not during recess?

Australian teachers seem to have something against chocolate. Back in February, an Australian mom was shamed by her child's teacher for sending her pre-schooler to school with a slice of chocolate cake.