It occurred to me today that lunchladies might be screwed for reasons that are beyond them.
My wife and I, years ago, in one of our many attempts to gain insight into the best ways to parent our children, read a book called Parenting with Love and Logic. It was a great book, as I recall, and it introduced us to many good parenting concepts, one of which was a governing principle regarding what we do for our children.
The idea was pretty simple –> a parent shouldn’t do for their child what the child can do for themselves. Parents need to make an agreement to not do things for children, when the children can do for themselves, so that the children learn to be functional and autonomous. Parents who do things for their children, that the children can do for themselves, demean the children and their ability to contribute.
Many children these days are so used to having things done for them, that they lack the ability to initiate their own work or to struggle in the midst of a task on their own. Additionally, children will learn not to do certain things for themselves, if the parents are always there to do it for them, and then, that feeling of lazy helplessness starts to transfer to other areas of the child’s life, robbing the kids of any initiative that they might have shown on their own.
Quite to the contrary, a child who is expected to do what they are able to do for themselves learns responsibility for those behaviors and then becomes more likely to be successful down the line, when additional responsibility, or more complex responsibility, is expected.
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If my children are responsible for making a meal for themselves, they will put together nacho chips with melted shredded cheese on top, and they will declare it a culinary masterpiece. They will try to convince you that it is the greatest thing that was ever devised by any chef anywhere.
If I make them a meal, they complain about it.
And, it’s not just that they make what they want, and I don’t make what they want, because they complain even when I make what they want, so there’s that.
And, now that we are on summer vacation, and my children are home –which, technically, they’ve been home since the middle of March, so this is just the beginning of a summer vacation that actually started, for all practical purposes, almost three months ago– they’ve decided to start taking advantage, at their discretion, of the summer meal program that the local school district runs.
The local school district provides breakfast and lunch for any school student who makes their way to the school to pick those meals up. We printed the calendar and put it on the fridge and the kids can look each day and decide whether or not they want to go to the school to get the lunch for the day, or if they want to make their own lunch, or if they want to roll the dice and see whether or not Mom or Dad is going to make something good.
The other day, I noticed that my children went to the school to get the school lunch for the day. As we all sat down at the dining room table to have lunch, I noticed that my children were complaining about the lunch that they got from the school.
The free lunch, that they didn’t have to do any work to create.
It had no value in their minds.
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If you’ve ever heard the phrase, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch”, which is a phrase that means to say that everything has a price and that handouts always end up costing someone something, you might understand what I’m thinking. Here I am, thinking about free school lunches, and the funny thing about these particular free lunches is that they are of less value to my children, apparently, than a plate of nachos and cheese.
Why is it that we value less what costs us little or nothing? Shouldn’t those things that have cost us little or nothing be of greater value to us, simply because they didn’t cost us?
And these free school lunches are packed with protein and fruits and vegetables –good ones, the ones that kids actually like– and the lunchladies have included all that they can to make the meal nutritious and delicious, but my kids aren’t having it.
I think it must have something to do with the work involved for my children. My kids are always proud of the work that they do, whenever they accomplish anything at all. The sink of dishes that they washed is an act worthy of the highest praise. The sticks picked up in the back yard is a feat worthy of a made-for-TV documentary.
Maybe this is true of everyone, now that I think about it.
It is certainly the case that I have been guilty of excess pride when it wasn’t warranted. I know that I could come up with a list of adults guilty of the same thing in the past. It’s a bias, I suppose, that we over-value the work that we do, and we undervalue the work that others do.
If I ask my kids how they built the amazing plate of nachos with melted cheese, they describe it as if it were a harrowing, twelve-hour brain surgery.
But, they mock the work of the lunchladies.
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When someone does something for you, assuming that it is something that you can’t do for yourself, I would hope that gratitude would be a pretty natural response for any person with any kind of decency. The understanding that you could not have accomplished the thing that someone else was able to accomplish for you, should illicit a grateful attitude.
But, something entirely different happens when someone does something for you that you could have done for yourself. They undervalue your work and are less likely to be thankful. It’s a real shame, when you stop to think about it.
I’m not really sure where this whole post was going, but it has something to do with work and gratitude, independence and interdependence.
So, let me just close with this:
At the school where I work, for several years in a row, I was responsible, at the beginning of the year, for teaching our student body about the behavioral expectations in the cafeteria. I don’t remember how I originally got assigned the responsibility, but I grew into the role, for sure.
One of the things that I did, as I was teaching our students how to act in the cafeteria, was to tell them about my mother, who was a lunchlady for thirty years. I would tell my students, year after year, about the stories that my own mother would come home and tell about how horribly she’d been treated by students at her work.
And, as I told my students this story, year after year, with tears in my eyes, I reminded them to be sure to be nice and respectful to the lunchladies, because they are worthy of respect.
Now, truth be told, my mother retired a few years back from many decades in the healthcare industry, and she’d probably be mortified to hear that she was a party to a lie that I repeatedly told to get my students to be nice to the lunchladies where I work, but I think that sometimes, the ends justify the means.
All of the words that have preceded this have meant to say: I think that lunchladies get a bad rap –> partly because they are doing a job that is undervalued, and partly because they are doing something that our students could do for themselves –although it’s hard to imagine a school of any size incorporating a system where students efficiently make their own lunches.
The next time you see a lunchlady, even if it’s a fictional lunchlady like my mom, thank them for what they do. Chances are, they are underappreciated.
It Occurred To Me Today 