I'm going to disagree with most of the posters here. I do not think that such a donation from the painters, "for the children" was given with the best of intentions. I think that they gave it because they may think it was of the best of intentions, but is more indicative of a thought process that often results in good people caught up into child protective services' net; because on some level, these painters have come to believe that you are not quite capable of maintaining a household with children on your own, and that is equivalent to bad parenting.
I was, not so long ago, an agent of the state in similar contexts. Not as a social worker, but as a "resource parenting household". Basically, foster care. We have since adopted three children, and are no longer eligible to house wards of the state, because the rules of the state of Kentucky put the maximum at 5 children total per household, and we still have two natural teenagers. During our "training", we were given several scenarios and asked to decide if the parents were neglectful. Many included the 'poor' and 'appear poor' households. Every single one of them were actual cases that were, eventually, ruled to be not neglect by a court somewhere; but only after some unfortunate family was pulled through the ringer. One that sticks in my mind was a, actually poor, family that had almost no food in the house except dry cereal. The small children were taken into state care, placed with foster families that had no details of the alleged crimes, and could only visit with their parents one hour per week while under the "supervision" of the foster care family. This went on until the first court hearing, many weeks later, wherein the judge; almost immediately asked, "how much cereal was in the house?" and then asked the CPS lawyer "Is dry cereal an inappropriate meal for a child?" (Answers were "several boxes of various dry cereals" and "Yes, cereal is typically a well balanced meal nutritionally") Upon inquiry, the original CPS agent admitted that she removed the children based upon the admission from the mother that the kids have often been fed cereal for dinner. The judge dismissed the case pretty much immediately, and scolded the CPS agent for imposing her "perspectives" about what qualifies as an appropriate meal nutritionally. Later details included the additional facts that the father worked, but not a lot due to chronic health issues; the mother was disabled for work prospects (epileptic, IIRC), and the family was on SNAP (government food aid in the States, for those not familiar), and the mother had found a particularly good deal on cereal, and had decided to use up her SNAP funds buying all she could. The result being that, they had plenty of food, but not much variety, during the month of that CPS visit.
Also, since not all cereal qualifies under SNAP rules, (not the candy cereals like Fruit Loops) we can also infer that these boxes of cereal were the kind that can be lived off of quite well; such as Cherrios, Shredded Wheat, etc.
My belief is that the painters need to be scolded for jumping to conclusions about another household, the box returned to them, and a notice that their attempt to interfere in the raising of children (who are not fat) is offensive and wrong. This kind of 'Clover' attitude should be opposed, and stamped out of civil societies.
