We are so glad we are not children in New Zealand right now, since birthdays just got a little less sweet in one school. Reuters is reporting that the Oteha Valley primary school in New Zealand banned birthday cakes, due to the new government healthy eating guidelines. Students may not be able to bring and share cake at Oteha Valley, but at least they are still allowed to celebrate their birthdays at school. Wow, gee thanks.

Oteha Valley has a large number of September and October babies, resulting in up to four cakes per week in some classes. Some parents supposedly believed that they were required to bring a cake, which of course is not true (that would be a sweet law though!). Instead of just telling parents to bring less cakes or telling them to consider bringing different gifts/food items, the school felt banning was best.

The Ministry of Education led to crusade to remove birthday cakes and other sweets from all schools, but claimed that school’s should focus on food sold on the premises and not food brought in from the outside. This seems kind of ironic, since you’d think they’d be more concerned about food from the outside, and not just for health reasons!

We hope that one day the kids will be able to have their cake once again, and eat it to. We know that childhood obesity is a growing problem in the Western world, but on a kid’s birthday, they should be able to have cake. Especially Elementary students, in which 30 minutes of cake eating time barely cuts into their “rigorous” studies. We really hope this idea doesn’t spread to other schools or continents!

[Reuters]

• Teacher confiscates student’s birthday invitations after not inviting the whole class
• Boy’s haircut is so bad, he’s banned from school
• The victims of underage prostitution… are older sex workers? What? Really?
• Official Indonesian webpage hacked over porn ban