This post is part of the Collective Punishment Basics series—a foundational guide for understanding how systemic exclusion shows up in schools and why it causes deep harm to disabled, neurodivergent, and vulnerable children. If you’re just starting to name what feels wrong, this is a place to begin.
It might seem harmless. A teacher stands before a class with a box of lollipops or a bag of Freezies, offering them as a reward for good behaviour. But there’s a catch: everyone only gets one if everyone behaves.
What appears—on the surface—as a treat, quickly becomes a threat.
For neurodivergent children, food-based group rewards don’t function as recognition or celebration. They function as leverage. They encode compliance and transform bodily needs and sensory comfort into a spectacle of shame, performance, and control. And they harm the children least able to meet unspoken expectations most.
Because at the moment a teacher says, “I was going to give you all a Freezy, but some people were too loud in gym…”—they are not giving a treat. They are taking something away.
They are denying a sensory regulation tool.
They are breaking trust.
And they are reinforcing, over and over again, that belonging is conditional—and that your body’s needs are a problem.
Why food is never neutral
Food is not a reward; food is a need. And when schools treat it as a tool of behavioural management, they cross a line that should never be crossed—especially with children who are neurodivergent, disabled, traumatized, or poor.
For some children, sugar is dysregulating. For others, it’s the only thing that helps them stay alert through the final hour of the school day. For some, a cold treat like a Freezy helps them cool down and regulate sensory input on a hot day. For others, it’s the only consistent pleasure in an otherwise confusing social landscape.
When food becomes conditional, children learn to fear the withholding.
They don’t learn kindness. They learn that people in power get to decide who deserves to feel okay. They don’t learn cooperation. They learn to resent the kid who couldn’t stay still, or the one who didn’t understand the rule, or the one whose brain moved too fast or too slow or sideways compared to theirs.
And for neurodivergent children—for those who rely on routines, on concrete promises, on a clear understanding of when and how things will happen—this kind of bait-and-switch feels like betrayal.
They may cry. They may scream. They may crumble or shut down or beg for a second chance. And the worst part is, adults will treat this response not as injury, but as misbehaviour.
As if the pain of being denied something your body and heart were counting on is somehow evidence that you never deserved it.
The moral cost of managing children through their hunger
There’s a reason ethical guidelines around research, healthcare, and youth services restrict the use of food as coercion. It is a basic principle: you do not make people earn what they need to survive, soothe, or participate.
Children cannot learn safety from someone who controls their access to comfort. They cannot learn trust from someone who makes them watch others receive what they were denied. They cannot learn cooperation in a system that forces them to monitor and report on the “bad behaviour” of their peers.
And they certainly cannot learn self-regulation from the back end of shame.
When a child has food-related trauma, sensory sensitivities, or metabolic conditions like diabetes, these moments go even deeper. They teach the body that safety is unreliable. That a grown-up’s goodwill is volatile. That other people’s actions determine whether your needs get met.
This is not character education. It is grooming children to accept systems where power and punishment are arbitrarily linked.
Learn more about why food should not be used as a reward or punishment.
What educators can do instead
If you have extra snacks, give them. If you have a special treat, offer it with joy. But never take it back. Never tie it to compliance. Never use it to “motivate” a group.
If one child is struggling, meet their need individually. If a pattern is emerging, ask what unmet needs might be driving the behaviour. Reflect. Adapt. Don’t punish the group.
And if you’ve ever taken food away from a class to “teach them a lesson,” this is your opportunity to do something better next time.
Food is care. Food is connection. Food is not currency.
