Preschool Packed Lunches
So your little one is starting preschool and for the first time you’re
sending in a packed lunch. When you were little it probably wasn’t uncommon to
be sent with a sandwich filled with some awful paste (and a token slice of
cucumber), a packet of crisps and a Capri-sun. How things have changed!
Children’s packed lunches are being scrutinised everywhere to ensure they’re
nutritionally balanced, and so the pressure is on for you as a parent to get it
right.
Is My Lunchbox Healthy?
Have you seen Parenting.com’s
healthy lunchbox maker? You can drag and
drop the ingredients in your child’s lunchbox and watch the nutritional
information pop out at the other end!
However, you can waste quite a while on this and at the end of the day, only
get a bunch of numbers that mean very little; so instead why not spend the time
reading on....!
We know that every parent probably worries about whether their child’s
lunchbox is healthy enough, particularly because your child’s lunch is now seen
in public every day for the first time. So here are some tips - some for your
lunchbox and some for you!
Don’t spend too much time
worrying
Don’t get too caught up in trying to create The Perfect
Lunchbox. It’ll mean you end up worrying too much about what goes in it every
day, and you may then end up worrying about whether it all gets eaten. If you
invest too much in this, you may find yourself getting needlessly stressed,
which won’t help. Many mums find themselves worrying about what their child is
eating at each meal, when considering nutritional intake at each meal in isolation matters a lot less than what
your child eats over a day, and even over a week.
Don’t send foods you HOPE they
will eat
We hear from preschool teachers that children are being sent in with
foods they won’t eat at home in the desperate hope that they will eat it at preschool.
On one hand you’re right, they are more likely to eat a food when sitting among
peers who are also eating it, as they want to fit in. Also, there really will be no alternative to
the lunch you have provided – no sneaky bowl of yogurt or pack of pom-bears to
make sure they have something. On the other hand, just because your child eats
the food when among peers doesn’t mean they’ll suddenly eat it at home, so you
probably will not actually be solving the problem. It just means that their
need to be included was bigger than their need not to eat the food, when
surrounded by their peers. You can use strategies to exploit this social need
at home, but you need to do the work.
Understand your important role
As a parent, your child looks to you for reassurance that what they
are eating is safe and they trust you more than anyone else. This goes back to
Neanderthal times, when it might have been unsafe to eat certain berries so a
healthy distrust of new foods served a child well. An older, wiser, trusted person
would have played an important role in helping them eat the safe food and avoid
dangerous ones. With this in mind, your child doesn’t have the same
relationship with their teacher as they do with you. Therefore, the preschool
dining room is not the place for a relative stranger, who cannot spend
repeated time one to one with them, to undertake the task of helping your child
become familiar with a new food.
Reframe a problem as an
opportunity to help your child
The best way to really change your child’s attitude towards a
particular food is undoubtedly to help them become familiar with it yourself,
in a safe environment, with lots of time and patience. If your child isn’t
eating a food at home, ask yourself what you can do to help change things? What
is the problem here? Is it about lack of familiarity or is it about something
else (e.g. using the food to exert their will)? How can you help them with this
problem? When you work out how to help them and it works, it’ll have a positive
impact on your confidence, your self-esteem as a mother and the trust between
you and your child. It will also promote a dynamic of collaboration and unity
between you, instead of resistance.
Be realistic
When you do your weekly shop, sit down and plan your lunchboxes for
the week and more importantly WHEN you are going to prepare them. It’s all very
well planning a fabulous gourmet each day but if you’re juggling other children
or work, your enthusiasm will probably wane and you’ll resort to the same old
stuff. Then you set yourself up for feeling like a failure. So don’t do it to
yourself - be realistic.
Plan a Week of Lunches In
Advance
Your little one should be eating different foods on different days to
prevent boredom. Exposing them to a variety of foods will expand their tastes.
A healthy lunchbox should ideally contain protein, carbohydrates, dairy and
fruit / vegetables. Don't fret if you can't get all of these into a single box,
though. Your child can make up deficiencies in other meals and snacks if
necessary when they get home or at breakfast time. Remember, it’s what your
child eats over a day, or even a week, that matters.
Variety is the Spice of Life
Variety can simply mean sending in a sandwich on Monday, stuffed Pitta
on Tuesday and a Wrap on Wednesday – this is variety and keeps your lunchbox
interesting. The key to keeping your child’s interest and to having a better
chance of your lunch being eaten is to use your imagination when it comes to
the foods you offer. Would you want to eat the same thing, day in and day out,
all the time? You want your child to be interested in eating the food you send
– food is the fuel for your baby’s developing brain and body and if the tank is
running on empty it will run poorly. So don’t let boredom get in the way of your
goal – aim for increasing curiosity instead. However, repetition is also good
to some extent, and familiarity is also one of the keys to getting your food
eaten - so aim to rotate a variety of lunches involving familiar foods rather
than giving your child something completely new to eat in their lunchbox.
Send in the food in an
accessible, edible format
If your little one can’t peel an orange, then send it already peeled.
If you know the cherries need deseeding and halving, then do it beforehand.
Make sure the food you are sending requires very little adult intervention or
supervision, and make it friendly for little hands to pick up and enjoy at
their own pace. If you do this, you’re maximising your child’s opportunities to
make decisions and act on them, and this will build confidence. You’re also
maximising your child’s opportunities to interact with food unimpeded. If an
adult has to ‘interrupt’ this process by taking the food away to peel it, for
example, just as your child has picked it up, then they are getting in the way
of your child’s learning process by exerting a level of control – you want to
give your child maximum control here.
Use Leftover Dinner as Lunch to
Save Time
Make your life easier whenever you can. If you plan your dinners as
well as your lunches, you can get clever and kill two birds with one stone. For
example, our
Tortilla Tapas recipe works great as a hot dinner served with salad as
well as cold in the lunchbox a day or two later.
Image courtesy of frredigitalphotos.net
We like to
set our little ones a good example and encourage sharing. We don't mind
you using any of the information, recipes and tips from our website, all
we ask is that you credit us hard-working mummies here at Yummy
Discoveries.
Thank you x
