A mum has claimed her daughter was forced to sit by herself at lunchtime due to her 'smelly' lunch.
Taking to Reddit, the mum asked for advice after her six-year-old daughter came home from school and told her she no longer wanted packed lunches, because she wanted to be able to sit with her classmates.
"My daughter is six and is grade two but [has] only been remote until a few months ago so she hasn’t physically been in school for long," the mum explained.
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"Recently she told me she didn’t want her packed lunches anymore and what [sic] to eat what the other kids were eating. She had been not wanting to eat what were her favourite foods and opting for asking for pizza more.
"I asked her why she didn’t to eat her favourite foods anymore and she told me she wanted to be able to sit with the other students."
The mum explained she was shocked to hear her daughter hadn't been sitting with her friends, adding: "She told me it was because her teacher made her sit in the other room by herself during lunch times because she brought 'smelly foods'.
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"To be clear growing up I was also targeted by teachers who wouldn’t let me bring shrimp or anything with garlic or onion because they hated the smell.
"So I try not to pack anything that could cause them to target my child like spam sushi or egg fried rice. I was really upset because she is half Chinese but she clearly looks Asian and I felt it was my childhood trauma happening on her."
The mum explained that she called the teacher for a meeting, who claimed they didn't make her daughter sit alone.
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"But my daughter told me to ask her best friend who confirmed for me that yes she had been," the mum continued.
"Another teacher confirmed he had seen her eating alone and her home room teacher switched stories that she had but it was because my daughter brought a persimmon to school and it was distracting the other kids because they thought she was eating a tomato and she didn’t want her distracting the other students by having 'foreign' food.
"She refused to believe it was inappropriate and said she didn’t see anything wrong with sending her to eat by herself. I had to go to the principle and take my daughter to another home room to finish up the school year because that teacher said it only happened once despite my daughter swearing up and down it happened every few days for weeks before she told me."
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Other Reddit users were super supportive of the mum, with one person writing: "The teacher shouldn’t even be teaching if they’re going to discriminate and punish a kid just because she doesn’t have ‘Western’ foods. This will traumatise the kid and make her feel embarrassed of her own ethnicity."
While another said: "This use to happen to me all the time when I was in elementary school. I’m Filipino and would bring rice with all kinds of different foods like chicken adobo. But I was bullied so much and teased and the teachers never did anything about it. It got to the point where I refused to even open my lunch box."
And a third added: "Even if it happened "just once" that is way too much. This kind of thing is hard on kids."
Lucy Devine