Some individuals believe that schools ought to have social responsibilities for discouraging students from eating junk food, while others argue that the parents should be in charge of this. Although parents have a crucial impact on children’s diets, because of their supervision, I firmly believe that schools should have more responsibilities of children’s diets, as they play more significant role in this.
One primary reason why parents should have responsibility for shaping children’s diets is that they have greater impact at home. Parents have greater control what their children eat on a daily basis, since they decide what meals and drinks to buy and prepare. By purchasing only sugary drinks or fast food, children are more likely to consume them together with their family, thereby starting to be used for these meals. This is because children are naturally copy their parent’s habits and monitoring what their parents buy and consume can significantly contribute to their overall diet. However, with replacing them with heathier alternatives, children can feel left with no choice but to eating mainly healthier food. For instance, providing only vegetables and fruits from an early age can foster children consume them more frequently, reducing the chance of changing their habits. Therefore, children are more likely to continue eating healthy meals as they get older.
On the other hand, I assert that schools should indeed to have social responsibilities for shaping children’s diets. School education can provide a proper guidance and a detailed explanation of the consequences of junk food. They can conduct lessons related to consumption of healthy meals, give them topic linked to healthy food for learning as a homework and explain everything to children in a more enjoyable way, so that children could understand the benefits of healthy food and drawbacks of junk food more effectively, which ultimately leads to making more well-founded decisions. Formal education has also practical opportunities such as making schools premises healthier. For instance, schools can limit availability of junk food and replace them with healthier alternatives such as vegetables and fruits. Consequently, being aware of negative effects of junk food and eating only healthy choices allows children to have better long-term habits.
In conclusion, although parents have greater control over the eating habits of their children, I firmly believe that schools should have responsibility of encouraging them to consume healthy food, as they have more opportunities to do this more effectively.