Amanda WallerAccording to research, breakfast is vital to children because it provides the nutrients they need to start the day. Moreover, eating breakfast can help them stay more focused in class, have better behavior, and improves social-emotional development.
Breakfast programs believe that all children deserve to have a healthy meal so that they can perform better academically and lessen their absences. To make breakfast easier to access, these programs create breakfast options such as eating breakfast in classrooms and quick breakfast meals. Nevertheless, they want to assess how the schools and students benefit from these programs in the future. There have been more and more schools that participated in the study to better understand how sustainable this kind of program in the long run.
What they have discovered so far is that some of the biggest hurdles in increasing breakfast participation are the school administrators, the negative notion of eating breakfast given by schools, quality and variety of food, and logistics. The support of the breakfast options can help families and school staff to create more flexible breakfast meal choices.
Moreover, it will facilitate and sustain breakfast participation especially with elementary students when they are served breakfast in their classrooms. The schools that participated in the study reported that social awareness, a sense of community, better connections, and improved self-management ability have been seen in their students. More than 90% of the participants also said that these programs can develop students’ behavior and concentration in class.
