The Epic Journey of School Lunch

For a time I had my children transitioned to bringing lunch from home. They were happy. Then we moved to CA and I got my ABA job - and lack of money and time led them back to school lunch. Behaviors continued to increase - but in truth it is hard to say if this was the stress of my work, puberty, or our decreasing diet. Our eating habits before were not Paleo - although they were fresh fruits and vegetables and whole grains - so still better.

Then I got my supper awesome job, and we started to regain control. I decided that we would eat Paleo because it seemed to include every health need for my family, meaning everything that I had previously found to be triggers for behaviors. As I have said before - I knew S reacted to sugar and artificial sugar. I also knew L had drastic improvements going gluten free. I never really worried about J. I never really identified a specific need in his diet.

Yet now I am wondering.

This week I discovered an amazing app available to track school lunches. It is called My School Bucks, and while it does not work for every district it does work with my children's district. I was very thrilled that it can track every time my children uses their lunch account.

You may be wondering what the big deal is - if I just do not give them money then it does not matter. Except that we qualify for reduced lunch, which is actually offset to be free lunch, so they do not need me to add money to their account. So, to take away their account I would have to go head to head with two schools. I will if I need to. But if I do not then why.

I also knew that my kids were getting school lunch on the side. It was my way of helping them transition into the Paleo lifestyle, from our junky eating life. Going cold turkey of gluten was advised against in may of the books I had read - if gluten does act like a drug then I could see why that would be a bad thing.

My way of transiting was letting them 'sneak' school lunch. I had even given them permission to go once a week for a treat.

But now it was time to cut down, and I had a way to enforce it.

L and S were easy. I just had to let them know I could track it and they were done. J kept pushing the boundaries. He had to know that I was continuing to track him. Then he stopped and we had a week of rocky behavior - which is leveling out now thankfully.

So, was his behavior caused by the gluten or by being caught lying? His behavior was irrational, and never happened immediately after I told him I saw he ate at school again. It peeked a day after his last school lunch infraction, and calmed down about three days later. I am thinking how he eats effects him as much as I have noticed in his sisters.