It was with a bit of “no duh” that I read the recent news about kids and snacks: According to a study in the journal Health Affairs, children get close to 30 percent of their calories from snacks—about three of them every day.
You see, I own approximately three-thousand plastic kid-size snacks bowls in a variety of colors and sizes. There have been large schools of Goldfish crackers living under my sons’ carseats, and I used to empty out the contents of my purse and shake it free of pretzel and graham cracker debris almost weekly. I am familiar with the fervor and frequency with which little kids eat snacks.
We dietitians like to say that snacks should “fill in the gaps” left from mealtime (like if your child skipped fruit at breakfast, give him an apple mid-morning). But we moms use snacks as much more than gap-fillers. We use them to bribe (“if you get in the car, you can have your string cheese”) and to occupy (“here, eat these Craisins while Mommy looks at carpet samples”). And as anyone who has suffered through a raging meltdown from an over-hungry child at library story hour knows, a well-timed baggie of Triscuits can help us avoid public humiliation as well.
But lately, I’ve been feeling serious snack fatigue. I recently saw a mom at the playground pushing her child from the front of a bucket swing. Every time the child swung toward her, she popped a bite of food into his mouth. What are we doing? I thought. If, as the study researchers point out, our kids are moving toward “continuous eating”, how will they ever know what it feels like to have a growling stomach?
So I’ve started living dangerously: I’ve been letting my kids go hungry. Just a little bit. Instead of always leaving the house with an arsenal of snacks, I’ve been trying to keep just one ziptop bag of raisins on me. I figure that if my kids are truly hungry, they’ll eat them. And at home, I try and wait for them to ask for a snack before offering one–and say “no, not right now” sometimes too.
I’m happy to report that neither Henry nor Sam has dropped dead of hunger at tumbling class or fainted on the walk home from school. And they’re eating more at dinnertime too. (Plus, my car and my purse are much cleaner.)
My friend Amy (aka Citizen Mom) wrote a great piece on kids and snacking for the Philadelphia Inquirer, and featured one of my snack recipes. You can read her story here.
Photo by Valerie Everett
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I agree with you on the snack thing. That said, by the time kids get to middle and high school, they are typically not given the time (or allowed) to eat a morning snack. The result is a building filled with tween/teens who ate breakfast at or before 7:00am who don’t get to eat again until lunch … which can be anywhere from 10:30am – 1pm. I sure wish there was a happy medium here!
I really appreciate your honesty. As professionals we’re supposed to “know better” and give our kids sit-down, mini-meals for snacks, but the reality is that isn’t always possible. We do need to be conscious of how and how often we’re offering food though. I often question why snacks seem to be automatic at most organized kids events. Do we really want to send our kids the message that food needs to be included in every activity?
Couldn’t agree more, Sally! I was really happy with myself today because I gave my girls a snack at 3:30 before we went to the playground and told them I was only bringing water with me to the park and that this was the last thing they were eating until dinner. And everything was okay! Besides the unhealthy aspects of constant snacking, it’s exhausting to pack snacks all the time, especially since I always seemed to have enough for us to be okay for a week should we get stuck in a cave or something at the playground. Anyway, great topic!
I allow my boys to have two snacks a day – one around 10 AM and one around 3 PM. I try to center them around something healthful such as a fruit (they love blackberries) or a veggie (bell pepper strips are the favorite), though by the end of the week we’ve usually run out of produce (food shopping is scheduled for Friday or Saturday morning) and I have to resort to crackers or pretzels.
That being said – my 2 year old is going through a growth spurt (it seems) and snacked all morning long today!
Anyway-I like this article!
Thanks for the great comments, everyone.
@Liz–you are so right. Seems like we make it very hard on middle- and high-schoolers to get the food (and the sleep!) that they need at the right times. My older son is almost six, and I’m starting to catch glimpses of what it’s going to be like when he’s a tween/teen and can’t get enough calories into his body!
@Alix–good for you! And yes, it is exhausting to pack up all those snacks and lug them around. That was smart to give them advance notice that you weren’t bringing snacks.
@Kathleen–I completely agree, why does every event require Capri Suns and Ritz Bits?
@mamatwoboys–My boys love frozen fruit, so that’s something to consider if you find yourself running out of fresh. They eat frozen blueberries right out of the bag, or we make smoothies with a frozen banana, frozen blueberries, and yogurt. (That’s actually a great use for past-their-prime bananas–peel, wrap in plastic wrap, and freeze).
I read in “the no-cry picky eater solution” that they usually need one morning snack and one afternoon snack. Instead of giving empty calorie snacks things though, the book suggests giving something that otherwise would have been on the child’s lunch or dinner plate. Great idea I think.
Yes! I agree that most snacks should be something you’d be okay with on their plate at a meal. There’s certainly room for other stuff, and I occasionally have things like graham crackers in the house, but I try to keep the “every day snacks” things like fruit, cheese, yogurt, etc. One day my 3 year old asked for a bowl of peas for his snack. I tried not to cry with happiness as I heated them up.
It was a one-time-only request, but I was just happy he made it. Thanks for your comment!
I try to limit the afternoon snacking as well, nothing after 430. but if I’m cooking dinner and she’s really hungry and eats the veges off the chopping board or asks for cold peas, i figure she’s eating the veg that would have been on her plate and possibly said no thanks mum to in 10 minutes. At least I know she’s had her veg then. But mornings and after lunch there is a time placed on the next snack,10 and 2.
I’m an RD and mom too. AND someone who NEEDS a snack between meals. I can rarely make it from breakfast to lunch without feeling ravenous and horrible. If we are running errands all morning, no snack for us and we have an earlier lunch. I just don’t haul food around. Recently we went to a story time that started at 10. We left earlier and then i handed out snacks and we sat in the car and ate them.
Adina–totally agree. I NEED snacks too!
So do my kids. But I realized I needed to stop hauling around loads and loads of stuff, because we were eating it just because it was there. And believe me, we eat our fair share of snacks in the car too. Thanks for your comment.
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