As kids head back to school, parents have to think about preparing healthy lunches for their little ones. CityLine.ca spoke with Caroline Fernandez, Activity Mummy at Yummy Mummy Club/Editor of ParentClub.ca, about how to make sure we’re packing the right food, and enough of it, to keep tots engaged and energetic until the afternoon bell rings.
1. Make it a family activity and get the kids’ input. Fernandez recommends sitting down with the kids and creating a grocery list with them. Don’t necessarily break things down into typical categories such as dairy, and produce – think in colours or textures, as kids are apt to do. “I take a piece of paper and I say, 'Tell me something crunchy. Tell me something soft. Tell me something yummy.' And then that way the kids can inject, 'Well popcorn is crunchy, and pretzels are crunchy.' It's the stuff that the kids know and like, and you put that list on your fridge so that you have a go-to list of what exactly it is that your kids will eat,” Fernandez says. “That's the problem with school lunches is, Mom can put in a whole bunch of nutritious stuff, but at the end of the day you could get a whole bunch of nutritious stuff back."
2. Know the rules at your kids’ school. Most are nut-free, and some discourage potentially messy items such as dips for fruit and vegetables. “I remember walking into the first day of kindergarten and one of the moms was like, 'I can't send Nutella to school?' That can be a shock. You have to think above and beyond what your normal at-home lunch ideas are,” Fernandez advises. “A lot of schools have fruit or cheese in the morning for the first snack, to give the kids a little bit of energy but not fill them up too much for lunch. Cut fruit is always the easiest, especially for little kids."
3. Go litter-less! Instead of packaging your kids’ snacks and sandwiches in disposable baggies, put them in reusable containers. Make sure your kids know how to open the containers by themselves. Fernandez recommends practicing lunch at home on a day before the start of the school year. “We all go in August and buy all these really great reusable containers because we want to help the environment. But not always can the kids open them on their own,” the parenting expert notes. “With my kids, this week we got new lunchboxes, and I practiced lunch, which means I put all their normal school lunch foods in their containers, and we took those lunchboxes to the park, and we practiced having lunch together so they could be in a fun setting and I could watch how they open their containers, and you can instruct on, ‘Well you lift this, (and) make sure you put it back in your lunchbox afterwards.’ You send off your containers with the hopes that they’re going to come back.”
4. Don’t forget about snacks. Most schools ask parents to provide a morning snack, lunch, and an afternoon snack. Cut fruits and vegetables are great snack options, as is protein-rich cheese. “In our school they asked you to number your containers 1, 2, and 3, so that kids would know that this is the snack you eat first, this is lunch, and this is the fruit snack at the end,” Fernandez explains. “A lot of kindergartens don’t allow any cookies or even any dips with carrots or that sort of thing. They just want a straight fruit or vegetable snack.”
5. No one likes browned apples. Cut-up apples are a great snack option, but they go brown so quickly. Fernandez sprinkles cinnamon on the apple slices – they mask the brown colour and also offer an extra taste element.
6. Buy in bulk to save money. Individual cereal boxes may look cute, but they’re a drain on the wallet. Buy in bulk, and package dry cereal in reusable containers for an easy snack. “Dry cereal is a fabulous snack for kids. The worst thing that’ll happen is they make a mess on the floor but their hands aren’t going to be messy. It’s food that they’re used to,” says Fernandez.
7. Label your child’s lunchbox and containers. Fernandez has two kids, and a third on the way, and she recommends putting the family name on the container rather than the child’s first name. “I don’t put their (first) names on it because I want the ‘hand-down-ability’ so I put our family last name, so Family Fernandez.”
Add your own school lunch suggestions by commenting below!