Should teachers give children lollies and chocolates for good behaviour?

Source: Radio New Zealand

Should teachers give children lollies and chocolates for good behaviour?

Some do even though Health Ministry guidelines say schools should not serve sweets or chocolate at all.

A teacher RNZ agreed not to name said rewarding children with sweets was surprisingly widespread – she saw it in about 20 schools she worked in recently across Auckland and Northland.

Northland parent Kali Kahn told RNZ teachers at her son’s first school routinely rewarded children with sweet treats.

“Lollies were given out in classrooms and in the playground for good behaviour like picking up rubbish in the playground or incentives to help clean up, as rewards for good work in the classroom,” she said.

Kahn said her son’s current primary school gave chocolate and lollies as special prizes.

She said neither approach was a good idea – especially in the far north.

“I absolutely don’t think that’s okay that teachers are giving out lollies as incentives or as rewards in the classroom or outside of the classroom in the playground. Within the school grounds the school should not be providing high-sugar foods to kids,” she said.

“There’s really poor dental health amongst our children. There’s high rates of teeth extractions, there’s high rates of cavities … We have rising rates of obesity and metabolic disease in children, it’s getting younger and younger our obesity levels and diabetes levels.”

Dental Association-Colgate oral health promotion manager Anishma Ram told RNZ lollies seemed to have become a common reward at schools.

She said the association obviously opposed the practice, but it also recognised that teachers seemed to lack other options for cheap, small rewards.

“Somewhere along the line it has become so readily available that we don’t have any other option,” she said.

Northland principal Pat Newman said his school rewarded classes with iceblocks a few times a year but some teachers also gave lollies.

He did not see a problem.

“The dental health that we’ve got in Northland is not caused by the few lollies or treats that they get at school. It’s probably caused by either the heaps of lollies they get from home or the malnutrition that they’re not getting the good food that they need. Or juice. Juice is one of your big ones up here,” he said.

“My attitude is they’d have to eat a hell of a lot of what we give out at school to actually damage their teeth. If they get one iceblock every couple of weeks it’s not going to do a hell of a lot of harm. If it means that they’re at school, well they’re better off at school and learning than not.”

Newman said teachers gave rewards for good behaviour.

“Going out and seeing them doing something nice, helping someone or going out and picking up some rubbish without us telling them. What we’re doing is we’re using it more for around citizenship and also for good work, but a lot of ours is around citizenship because that’s crucial,” he said.

In Rotorua, Kaitao Intermediate principal Phil Palfrey said he opposed the use of sweets as a reward or treat.

“It gives out the wrong message. We all try and cut down the lollies our kids eat and here we are at school saying ‘oh well, we’ll give out lollies’,” he said.

He said instead of sweets, the school’s teachers constantly gave praise for hard work and good behaviour.

They also had a system of awarding cards that could be cashed in for a pizza for the class – an item that would appear to sit in the health ministry’s no-no list, but one that Phil Palfrey reckoned was okay.

“I eat a pizza once every three months and I eat pretty healthily. These kids would only get probably at the most two or three pizzas in the whole year so I don’t think that’s too bad,” he said.

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand