As the number of parents joining their kids for a midday meal swells, schools have tried to be accommodating. Most schools value parent involvement, but at a certain point it can become disruptive. A middle-school teacher in Connecticut, who asked to be anonymous since she was not authorized to speak on the record, said that she doesn’t think parent-student lunches are a bad thing, but she has seen them cause issues in the past. “The parents would bring pizza for some students and not others. It became a little bit of a circus and I do remember feeling like it was disruptive instead of being just a sweet lunch between just the mom and the kid,” she said. “I think she was using lunch to try to buy her daughter friends,” the teacher said of one mom.

Some kids, especially the young ones, begin crying when their mom or dad attempts to leave after lunch. Other children whose parents aren’t able to visit them (possibly because they’re working) can be left feeling neglected. School districts have attempted to thwart these problems by forcing parents to sit with just their own children, sometimes in separate rooms or areas. Rogers Middle School in Texas even offers parents and children the opportunity to dine at a “bistro” with fancy-looking chairs to avoid lunchroom disruption.

But according to Katelin Chiarella, a second-grade teacher in Hayward, California, schools aren’t doing enough to stem the tide of family lunches. Chiarella bemoaned the trend, which she sees as just another example of helicopter parenting. “Some parents come in and actually spoon-feed their kids, kids who don’t need to be fed,” she says. “Some parents make hot lunch at home and bring it to them.” She says that there are at least seven or eight parents a day in her school’s lunchroom. The school has tried to curtail that number, but it hasn’t worked. “They kept showing up anyway,” Chiarella says.

Parents who do eat with their children said that family lunches are a positive thing. If anything, they argue, schools should be encouraging parents to become more active and involved in their children’s school lives. Sarah McSpadden, a mom and family vlogger who documents her family life on Instagram, said that eating lunch with her third-grade daughter and her daughter’s friends has provided a valuable window into her child’s social life. “You see what people are eating, not eating, see which kids are throwing food, talking too loud, who is sitting by themselves. It’s a chance to poke in on your kids’ day that you wouldn’t get if you didn’t have lunch with them,” she said. In her district, she says, there are parents who join their children for lunch up to three days a week.

Shamaila Quddusi Jairajpuri, a mom to a second grader in Alameda, California, said that if she doesn’t bring her son homemade hot food for lunch, he usually won’t eat. “He says, ‘Oh, Mommy, I want to have this [for lunch]. But if he takes it in the morning, it gets cold … pancakes, after three hours they are cold and rubbery, who wants to eat cold pancakes?” she said. “My son was a very picky eater in kindergarten. He would go hungry in the morning. I would feel bad because he would not eat. If I’m there, I can make him eat.”