Monday, August 26, 2019

The Rewards Project - A Registered UK Charity Geared At Putting An End To Sugary School Rewards

So it's back to school time, and zero doubt, many of your kids are going to have teachers and schools who will use candy and junk food as a reward.

It's a shame too, not just because they'll be providing your kids with junk, but also because they'll be teaching them, over and over and over, that junk is a reward for anything and everything.

I've written before about easy non-junk food rewards for teachers, I've also written about how you might want to approach things with your kids' sugar pushers, and I even kept track one year of just how much junk other people were offering my kids. What was clear from the response to all of these pieces was just how prevalent this problem was, and just how frustrated parents are.

Well as a sign of those times, in the UK, a new charity has popped up called The Rewards Project and its mission is trying to change this common practice. Click through and you'll find some sample letters to send to your child's school (though I think they'd be much better were they to offer some alternatives and suggestions in them and as I wrote about and linked above, lead with praise for the school and its teachers).

All this to say, if there are charities popping up geared at tackling this issue, clearly there's a real appetite out there for change. In turn this suggests - and my experiences with my kids' schools and more would definitely support this notion - that your kids' schools and teachers might be more open to changing things than you might think.

You'll never know unless you try.

(Thanks to Dr. Miriam Berchuk for sending this my way)