Woman stands up for daughter after teacher refuses to help with 'difficult-to-open' lunches

Raising children is a challenging task, in the initial years, there are several changes in their lives that kids find difficult to adjust to. One of the biggest changes is starting school. Apart from learning to be away from their parents, they also have to learn to adapt, adjust and be independent. Teachers play a vital role in supporting them for the same and parents entrust their children to the teacher’s care at school. However, a mother, u/aitaorissheasnob took to Reddit to share a rather harsh experience she had with her daughter’s teacher.

The mother began by sharing, “My daughter has some severe food intolerances, eating the wrong thing frequently ends in a hospital visit.” She further explained that this issue created problems for her daughter and her teacher. She mentioned that she had to pack her daughter’s lunch in a particular way so that her food intolerances wouldn’t act up.

However, this made her daughter’s lunch packages difficult to open. She further mentioned that when she had begun to try this technique, she noticed her daughter would return home with her lunch untouched. She said, “On Tuesday, when I opened her bag I found that the snack was untouched. She told me it was too tough for her to open. I asked her about previous weeks and she said, her teacher used to help her but doesn't anymore.”

At this, the mother got worried and asked her daughter to reach out for the teacher's help again. “The next day the snack was still unopened. She said that the teacher told her that she needs to learn to open her snacks by herself.” The mother then very politely emailed the teacher explaining her daughter’s situation. She also mentioned in the post, “I was nice about it, but you better believe it did tick me off that she would rather let a kid go without a snack than help.” After the entire scenario, she still found her daughter’s lunch untouched. “She said it might help if I sent my kid in with a ‘normal’ snack instead of such a ‘bizarre, difficult to open’ one. She is very aware of my daughter's food intolerances.”

Like any parent, she was done with the teacher’s stubborn tactics despite knowing the child’s problem. So, she spoke to the principal and had her daughter moved. Furthermore, she also wrote about how she’d like to give her daughter a ‘normal’ snack but her child’s food intolerance wouldn’t let her and she was trying hard to find creative ways to make her lunch interesting. The story doesn’t end here. Sometime after moving her daughter, she received negativity. She wrote, “She moved rooms but her previous teacher sent me a message about how I've really made things difficult over a snack. Two of the moms that she knows better than me commented that the way the teacher was being treated was ‘completely unfair.’”

In further updates, the mother also mentioned how the school has its pre-requirements of packaging which led to her child’s difficulty in opening the packaging. u/Dragnsfire said, “If they are making requirements of how a snack is packaged, then they are responsible for ensuring said packaging is opened for the child.” u/birdycrow said, “To me, this reads as laziness. A teacher saying that she’s refusing to help a kid do something because the kid has to be normal? That’s a red flag.”