School shames mom about ‘healthy choices’ for lunch after she packed chips

After her son’s school sent a note home shaming her for packing Pringles, one mom is going viral on TikTok for discussing the incident. This isn’t the first time a parent has gone viral for publicly sharing a note like this about their child’s lunch, but it’s particularly valuable to share these moments so everyone can learn something.

In her TikTok video, mom Megan Peavey (@peaveymegan) says she was at a loss on what to do after she received a note from her three-year-old son’s preschool about what she packed in his lunch. The note reads, “Please help us make healthy choices at school.” So what was the offensive food item in question? A handful of Pringles.

Related: Mom posts on ‘AITA’ about battling her son’s preschool teacher about his ‘inappropriate’ lunches—and yes, it’s ridiculous

I sent my son to school with Pringles, which is a very age-appropriate snack for a three-year-old,” she begins.

“And this is what the school sent, ‘Please help us make healthy choices at school,’” she reads. “They snack-shamed my three-year-old. They snack-shamed me by writing that passive-aggressively on his trash.”

On the Pringles container, no less. The message is pretty clear, right? Even if it is passive-aggressive, according to Peavey.

She also explains in her video that she takes issue with moralizing food in general, and that in her family’s household they don’t categorize foods as “healthy” or “unhealthy.”

“At our house, we do not label things as ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ because that starts eating disorders,” she said. “We don’t want them programmed like that. I have a background in mental health counseling. I am not gonna let my kids get a freaking eating disorder because of a school labeling things as ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy.’ That, to me, is unhealthy.”

Related: Dad goes viral for response to teachers who criticized his daughter’s ‘non-healthy’ lunch

She asked the commenters of TikTok to weigh in on the “ridiculous” matter—and a vast majority of parents are siding with Peavey:

Send Pringles the next day that day “when you buy it, you can decide what the snack is.

On his birthday…send pringles for EVERY kid in the class.

I cannot even explain how out of line and wild this seems to me- on the schools part 😳

I’m a prek teacher. Never would I ever tell a family to “make healthy choices.” My girls get a bag of chips w their sandwiches along w fresh fruit

Ohhhhh he’d be going with a FULL can on the next day with “no thank you” written on the side in bigggg bold letters! 😤

As a preschool mom myself, I can verify that yes, this is a thing some preschools do—including my daughter’s. All parents are regularly reminded that if we send in things like “cookies, chips, or candy” in our children’s lunch, they’ll be thrown away. THROWN AWAY. Meanwhile, preschools should know better than any other organization just how picky toddlers are about what they eat. And while the most “offensive” side dish I send in with my daughter is Cheez-Its, if so much as a crumb of her food was thrown away after someone in charge deemed it “unhealthy,” I’d hop on my broom and fly to that school faster than you can say “Oh HECK no.”

It’s especially unfair when you factor in the cost of chips like Pringles versus fresh fruit and vegetables—there’s plenty of research and data to back that up. Eating “healthy” (something we also don’t say in our house) costs more, period. Not every family can afford those choices.

In a follow-up video, Peavey says the confrontation with her son’s school didn’t go so well.

“So I dropped my son off at school today. I checked him in, and I saw that the director was there, so I initiated the conversation. So, I just shared how I was disappointed with how, you know, it was handled. I wish that they had reached out to me directly. I said it was kind of passive-aggressive to write it on his empty Pringles Cup,” she says.

Unfortunately, the school refused to take accountability for how they handled it and actually ended up kicking her son out of their summer program. All over a pack of Pringles.