My eight-year-old keeps volunteering my lunch packing for his friends

The first extra lunch was sweet. My son said his friend liked the little sandwiches I cut into squares, so I put an extra one in his bag.

By Friday, I was apparently running a sandwich business with no prices and a terrible delivery system.

He now asks for three extra sandwiches and a second bag of pretzels. Not because anybody has told us they need food. He says his friends like mine better, and he already promised.

That last part is where we keep getting stuck.

I told him I pack his lunch, not lunches for the whole table. He looked genuinely confused. I had said yes when it was one friend. In his version, he found something nice he could do for people, and now I was telling him to stop being nice.

In my version, I was standing in our kitchen before work with the last slices of bread, discovering an agreement I had never made.

I don't want to turn this into a speech about how generous he is allowed to be. I also don't want every weekday morning to become a negotiation over promises made at lunch the day before.

Yesterday I asked exactly what he had promised. Two friends were expecting sandwiches. A third had asked about the pretzels. He hadn't said “I'll ask my mom.” He had said “I'll bring you some.”

We have enough food for our household. The issue is the extra shopping, packing and responsibility becoming mine without a conversation. If another family actually needs support, I would want the adults involved rather than trying to guess from an eight-year-old's lunch table report.

I can imagine letting him choose something from his own packed lunch to share, within whatever arrangements the school has. But then he says he won't have enough for himself. Which seems to answer part of the question without resolving what he should say to his friends.

What would you make the next step? Tell him to retract every promise? Honor this week's promises once and draw a clearer line? I want him to keep the generous impulse while learning that volunteering somebody else's work is a different thing.