If children don’t eat properly, they cannot learn properly. Anyone who has tried to study for exams on an empty stomach can attest to this. If we conducted a survey with local food outlets they would probably confirm that they do more business over the exam periods than at most other times during the year.
If children don’t eat properly, they cannot learn properly. Anyone who has tried to study for exams on an empty stomach can attest to this. If we conducted a survey with local food outlets they would probably confirm that they do more business over the exam periods than at most other times during the year.
Eating properly however, does not simply mean having a full belly. It has a lot more to do with having a nutritionally balanced diet, particularly in a child’s earliest years.
If a child does not eat balanced meals in its first few years, it can suffer the consequences for the rest of its life.
As the SciDev.Net website article on Improving early childhood nutrition says, “Undernutrition
can delay brain development, impair academic performance and reduce productivity in later life”.
For these very reasons the government should be giving child nutrition programmes its highest priority.
It is almost universally accepted that breastfeeding is the optimal form of nutrition in the first few months of a child’s life, therefore society should encourage breastfeeding wherever and whenever possible.
However, our society is not doing enough to ensure that children eat balanced meals in those critical years immediately after babies have been weaned.
Vast numbers of children in this country who are under ten years of age now will be at a significant disadvantage in later life because they do not eat a balanced diet.
The many different reasons for this tragic state of affairs can be summed up under two over-reaching observations: firstly, impoverished sections of our population do not have enough money to provide nutritious food for their children and secondly, parents are not aware of the importance and methods of ensuring that their children are properly fed.
Society as a whole, and government in particular, should give the highest priority to addressing these issues.
The government under Thabo Mbeki made a lot of noise about poverty alleviation because it recognised how important it was as the root cause of the many of the problems in this country.
Sadly this did not contribute much to actual poverty alleviation. Government has not done nearly enough in terms of poverty alleviation or nutrition awareness programmes to ensure that all children in this country are eating nutritionally balanced meals.
