Come on now - "Critics denounce Pizza Hut reading program"

[Vodka7]

http://www.cnn.com/2007/EDUCATION/03/02/reading.for.pizza.ap/index.html

This one bothers me.

Back when I was a kid, three of us used to compete against each other in this program to see how much we could read and how many free pizzas we could get.  (And being the young nerds we were, no one cheated.)  And sure, a lot of what we read was crap (Aaron, for example, ran through the entire Goosebumps series, and Zach had a thing for those Scary Stories collections with the insane B&W art), but we stumbled across a few classics, and found a lot of stuff that we went back to later on.  Roald Dahl's short stories, for example, are still incredible.  And I may have read Bloom County because of Opus back then, but when I go back now I see all the political and social commentary I missed when I was 8.  (It's like Doonesbury if Doonesbury weren't so preachy and unfunny.)

I remember the Columbus Public Library also had a similar system where if you read a lot of books in the summer you got free crap.

And regardless of what I was reading, those two programs got me reading and kept me reading, and built up a lifetime habit that most people I know don't have.

[grislyatoms]

Oh gimme a frickin' break.


"The program is now under attack by child-development experts who say it promotes bad eating habits and turns teachers into corporate promoters."

Since when is eating bread, cheese, a little tomato sauce and a handful of vegetable and meat toppings considered "bad eating habits"?

"Turns teachers into corporate promoters"
My daughter's teachers have never even mentioned the program. As my kiddo reaches her reading goals, she gets a certificate for a free kid-size pizza.

This is utterly absurd. Is it marketing? Of course, but it's one of the most innocuous marketing programs I have seen. My daughter enjoys it, I enjoy it.

"In the name of education, it promotes junk food consumption to a captive audience ... and undermines parents by positioning family visits to Pizza Hut as an integral component of raising literate children," Linn said.

Pizza is not "junk food".

Captive audience? Undermines parents? Don't like it, don't participate!
 
I am so intolerably fed up with these talking heads attempting to run good programs into the ground to further their own agendas.

To hell with the "experts".

Vodka,

My daughter is very into Dahl's stories right now.



 

[Vodka7]

I just checked, and a personal sized pepperoni pan pizza has 640 calories, 29g of fat, and 1.5g of sodium--not health food by any means, but definitely something that has its place in the typical active's kids diet, who should be getting around 2,500 calories a day.  And if your kid like mushrooms or tomatoes (or even just a plain pizza) you can cut off 100 calories, and a lot of fat and sodium.

I don't see how letting parents, for free, reward their children for reading is anything but a good thing.

[El Tejon]

Because reading is its own reward and children should not be rewarded with filth.  Look how fat they are today.  The last things kids need today is even more food, especially garbage food.

Linking food to reward is horrifically dangerous, especially in modern America.

[grislyatoms]

Because reading is its own reward and children should not be rewarded with filth.  Look how fat they are today.  The last things kids need today is even more food, especially garbage food.

Linking food to reward is horrifically dangerous, especially in modern America.

I am surprised to hear that from you, El T! Especially equating pizza with "filth" and "garbage food". There is absolutely nothing wrong with a particular food, in and of itself.

Here's a little food for thought (I guess preacherman is getting to me ).

If someone were forced to eat nothing but cabbage, the DIET would be unhealthy.
If someone were forced to eat nothing but pizza, the DIET would be unhealthy.
If someone were forced to eat nothing but<insert food here or a combination of foods missing an essential nutrient>, the DIET would be unhealthy.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with any of those foods.

Should kids (and adults) eat a balanced diet? Absolutely, I won't argue that point one iota.

Here are some of my daughter's favorite "get home from school" snacks.

popsicle
raw carrots and celery with a little ranch dressing
an apple, orange, or banana
tinned Herring steaks (I am not kidding! She likes the ones with spicy green chiles, Beachcliff brand)
smoked salmon
canned fruit
a couple of cookies
crackers and peanut butter
a bowl of vegetable soup
a handful of chips

She does choose chips or cookies or a popsicle now and then but overall, she makes healthy choices.

I also do all the cooking, and I am willing to bet that our diet is much better than 90% of Americans. And we eat "filthy garbage pizza" every now and then .




   

[Monkeyleg]

No good deed goes unpunished.

[Lee]

Because reading is its own reward and children should not be rewarded with filth.  Look how fat they are today.  The last things kids need today is even more food, especially garbage food.

Yes...and we know they will all be motivated to read with offers of free broccoli and spinach.  Let's see if the California fruit and veggie growers make a counter offer.   Pizza is a heck of a lot healthier than all the other fried garbage kids seem to love. Inactivity is a far bigger culprit than any particular type of food.

I remember the Columbus Public Library also had a similar system where if you read a lot of books in the summer you got free crap.

They still do.  My kids cashed in this summer.  And to El Tejon's likely point, they didn't have to be rewarded with food.

[meinbruder]

Because reading is its own reward and children should not be rewarded with filth.  Look how fat they are today.  The last things kids need today is even more food, especially garbage food.

Linking food to reward is horrifically dangerous, especially in modern America.

I can agree with the first idea here; El T is right that reading is its own reward.  Reading was my refuge as a child; if I wanted to learn or experience the world, it was through the printed page.  I was buying books in the fifth grade and learning an enormous range of subjects at a young age.  Being nearly a shut-in until the age of eighteen I had no other outlet of exploration. My school system had an interesting reading program, read and get tested on comprehension before advancing to the next level of difficulty.  I was reading at a college level in the seventh grade.  If I wasnt already a social pariah, my reading scores in school doomed me to nearly complete exclusion by my peers.

My younger siblings were given a much wider range of social choices and had no interest in reading as a method of enriching their life.  Offering a food reward would (could) have made a difference for them.  My family had limited financial means and a free pizza would have been a huge reward to entice reading.  True, pizza isnt the healthiest choice but it would have been a welcome change from the endless bland pasta and rice/beans dishes of my youth.  Just a salad was a rare treat growing up and pizza was completely off-limits.  Imagine living in a world where McDonalds is a treat and you get the idea.

Food as a reward isnt a bad idea, in and of itself.  If I could have earned steak and salad for reading I would have been working towards it by the age of ten.  El T is also right about the weight problem in modern America.  A lot of kids dont get any exercise and spend most of their time in front of a TV or playing a video/ computer game.  Reading is just as sedentary but is at least educational.  A lot of kids dont understand the concept of money, but if reading a few books will get them a free pizza they will read.  It beats the daylights out of endlessly playing a video game.
}:)>   

[Standing Wolf]

We still haven't run out of snivelling, whining Puritans.

Amazing.

[Headless Thompson Gunner]

What do a bunch of whining anticapitalist nannystaters have to do with Puritans?

You're giving Puritans everywhere a bad name.

[Standing Wolf]

What do a bunch of whining anticapitalist nannystaters have to do with Puritans?

You're giving Puritans everywhere a bad name.

Today's socialist parasites are the moral and intellectual descendants of the Puritans. I'm aware the original Puritans weren't quite the sine qua non of religious intolerant types adamantly opposed to anything pleasurable, but that's the reputation they've ended up with.

[Vodka7]

Because reading is its own reward and children should not be rewarded with filth.  Look how fat they are today.  The last things kids need today is even more food, especially garbage food.

Linking food to reward is horrifically dangerous, especially in modern America.

I completely disagree.  The problem isn't pizza or even junk food as a reward, it's junk food whenever you want, all the time.  It's not if you're bad you don't get desert, it's "still hungry?  Go eat a bag of oreos."  It's not here's a lollipop for being good at the doctor's, it's grab as many as your fat hands can carry.  If you work hard all week, you deserve to spend a lazy Sunday afternoon at the grill with a beer in your hand.

Food as a reward is a good idea--not only does it reinforce good habits, but it sets up the idea that something like pizza in a restaurant is a reward, and not an every day occurance.

And Lee--glad to hear they've still got it running!  Getting up to the main library instead of our branch in Pickerington was always a treat.

[wmenorr67]

The reason kids today are fat is because parents don't make them go outside a play like they did back in the day.  Of course this world is not as safe as it was either.  I used to remember during summer break that kids would be out playing in the neighborhood all day.  The only thing was that you better be in before dinner.  Then you would usually go back outside and play until the streetlights came on.  Now you can't let your child out of your site for fear of some pyscho stealing your kid.

[HankB]

Yes...and we know they will all be motivated to read with offers of free broccoli and spinach. 

 
The reason some kids have to be motivated at all to read is because they haven't been introduced to reading as entertainment. (Comic books don't count!)

Reading seems like a job because an awful lot of the assigned reading is painful to youngsters - especially boys - since it's boring, preachy stuff usually falling into the category of "chick books" because most English / reading teachers are women, who choose the stuff they enjoyed when they were young.

Even classics (like Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer) are being removed from the curriculum since they're not "politically correct" enough for today's schools.

Fortunately, when I was in elementary school, we were given a great deal of leeway on what books to read for book reports . . . when I found Heinlein, H. G. Wells, T. Roosevelt (a bit of a hard read for a 3rd grader), Carl Akely, Joseph Heller, and reprints of the Tom Swift and Doc Savage novels were OK, my appetite for reading became voracious . . . and along the way, I even discovered some things that were educational as well as entertaining.

If I were presented with a list of "acceptable" titles for book reports that only included the likes of Vanity Fair, The Great Gatsby, or Uncle Tom's Cabin, my enthusiasm would've been quenched in short order . . . especially with no worthwhile "kid-valued"  incentive . . . like pizza.

[wmenorr67]

IIRC I started reading Kurt Vonnegut in 5th or 6th grade.  Never had a teacher tell me that it was inappropriate and some of his stuff can be rather extreme for someone of that age.

[mtnbkr]

The reason kids today are fat is because parents don't make them go outside a play like they did back in the day

Bingo!  Even when I see kids out today, they're walking or riding electric scooters to a friend's house to play video games or something.  We have a lot of kids in my neighborhood, yet I rarely see them out playing.  Our community's tennis courts and basketball courts aren't used to capacity.  The pool is busy on hot days, but not in a way that's promoting fitness.

course this world is not as safe as it was either.

Parents should be getting out with their kids as much as possible.  Not only can they help keep their kids safe, they can also get some much needed exercise.  When the weather is nice, I take my 3yo daughter biking (she rides in a trailer).  This weekend, I was outside several times with my daughter and my godchildren running around the backyard, playing tug-of-war, and just generally getting non-structured exercise.

A guy in the regional mtb club is organizing outdoorsy activities that parents with young children can participate in such as easy biking trips that can accomodate a trailer, day hikes, short camping trips, etc. 

Chris

[Lee]

"Look how fat they are today.  The last things kids need today is even more food, especially garbage food."
"The reason kids today are fat is because parents don't make them go outside a play like they did back in the day."

The press loves to single out fat people when they do news stories on this subject...just like they like to single out toothless rednecks, or gangbangers when they do gun stories.
 
I'm sure there are more fat kids today than there used to be...but not real sure. Out of my kid's friends and classmates (numbering 100 or so), I only know one girl who is moderately chubby.

It could also have something o do with the way obesity is calculated. See the link - calc for yourself
http://www.nhlbisupport.com/bmi/

I went from being fairly muscular a few years ago, to downright skinny now, and I'm still considered to be overweight!

 

[DrAmazon]

http://www.cnn.com/2007/EDUCATION/03/02/reading.for.pizza.ap/index.html

I remember the Columbus Public Library also had a similar system where if you read a lot of books in the summer you got free crap.

Under the heading of "small world", my first job was working for Pizza Hut, at the corner of E. N. Broadway and N. High in Columbus Ohio.

[SteveS]

I don't remember the percentages, but there are more obese children today than in previous generations.  There are also more obese adults and I would guess that these rates are probably similar.  If you look at obese kids, you'll probably find that they have obese parents.

I don't see anything wrong with an occasional pizza as a reward for a behavior you are trying to encourage.  I seriously doubt that a personal pan pizza per month is going to significantly affect your weight.