The Top 5 Most Confusing Snacks with Kids
There seem to be five top times of days when kids ask for snacks and we as parents waver on what to say (or do!). While the goal is never to offer our children more snacks than they need, we also want to highlight how each of these times of day can be used to offer deliberate, nutrient-dense snack options (rather than defaulting to something easy and yet empty of the nutrition our kids need!).
In this post, we will talk about:
Early Morning Snacks
Stroller Snacks
Afternoon Snacks
Before Dinner Snacks
Bedtime Snacks
The Top 5 Most Confusing Snacks with Kids
Use this guide to understand how early morning, afternoon, before dinner, bedtime snacks, and stroller snacks can compliment versus compete with your child’s overall diet.
Early morning
Before you are awake, have poured your coffee, or have had a minute to get breakfast ready, tends to be a particularly common time for kids to want to eat. This early-morning gray area often starts with littles who have dropped night time feedings or are newer to sleeping through the night. With this, often comes what still is or once was the “morning bottle” (or nursing session).
While I will get into more on introducing snacks to toddlers in an upcoming post, this is an important gray area to include here because kids of all ages may be subject to rising before you - as the adult - are ready or able to prepare a “well-balanced” breakfast.
In this instance, you likely want a simple > satiating snack.
If you remember back to 6 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Answering Your Child When They Ask, “Can I have a snack?,” we are going based on this basic rule of thumb:
“Snacks with less protein, fat, or fiber will be more simple (and thus less filling).
Snacks with more protein, fat, or fiber will be more satiating (and thus more filling).”
That’s because, as we will discuss in next week’s post on “Can my child have seconds at snack time?,” we want to consider what, when, and where snacks are offered in order to best meet our child’s nutritional needs. Offering We are not in control over how much they eat from what’s offered, so we need to consider how we can create light snacks if/when necessary.
If we offer them a prepackaged snack bar or full bowl of cereal with milk each morning in the 5-10 minutes it takes for you to be ready to cook oatmeal, scramble an egg, or spread nut butter on toast, it could be the difference between your young and impressionable eater “only eating cereal" for breakfast and them learning to cycle through a wider variety of combinations and variations. Depending on when they wake and when it works for your family to do “breakfast,” you might find that an early morning snack is more responsive to your child than a bedtime snack.
If that is the case, emphasize those simple, lighter snacks that are less likely to fill them up before the balanced meal offered shortly thereafter.
TRY THESE EASY EARLY MORNING SNACK IDEAS: A banana or small bowl of berries, a small cup of milk (4 oz) or small yogurt, or a handful or two of dry, fortified-cereal (or granola) are all nutrient-dense options that put a little something in their stomach while still being more of a simple (versus satiating) early morning snack. For more breakfast ideas that you can offer quickly with little to no prep, check out the Breakfast deck of Combination Cards! As shown in the example below, you can make more simple or satiating varieties of breakfasts depending on how filling you need them to be when offered (i.e. as an early morning hold-me-over or actual breakfast before leaving for the day).
After school Snacks
I hear from parents all the time that their kids are starving after school or following an afternoon nap, and often for good reason. Whether their school lunch is an early one and they aren’t allowed another snack or they have been sleeping for an extended period of time since lunch, this tends to be a time kids appetite is way up.
To use this time in your nutritional favor, aim to offer satiating > simple snacks.
It is easy to default to the simple, starchy snacks that kids often run right into the pantry to get themselves after school or upon waking from a nap. However, it is these snacks we parents often try to control the volume of, out of fear they will “overeat” them. If this tends to be a concern for you or a conflict with your child at snack time, consider how you could elevate that simple snack to make it more satiating. By making more deliberate choices to fill in more nutritional gaps (than is possible with our default, starchy snacks), kids can learn how to eat until satisfied while also adopting healthier habits that include more variety in their diet. This fills them up* while minimizing a parent’s feeling of needing to cut a child off from having seconds.
*When offering more filling snacks, just remember to take note of when dinner is so that the time span between the two allows enough time for your child to regain their appetite.
TRY THESE EASY AFTER SCHOOL SNACK IDEAS: Here are a few simple ways to be more deliberate with the starchy snacks kids often crave: For a young child, offer a hummus cup and/or cheese stick along something like pea crisps or veggie straws. For a preschooler, consider giving a nut butter pouch to enjoy with a banana and their pretzels. For an older child, you might make a homemade trail mix to take along with nuts, dry cereal, popcorn, dried fruit, and their favorite cheese cracker. For more ideas, see some of the examples I shared in this post on Travel Snacks as well as this one on foods to keep stocked in a kid-friendly snack drawer!
Stroller snacks (or snacks otherwise used to distract toddlers)
I get it. Some young kids just won’t chill in a stroller long enough for you to walk and talk with a fellow mom friend unless there are snacks involved...and lots of them! If this is the case, consider how you can:
Time your walks around snack time. Since I generally don’t recommend using snacks to pacify kids, the ideal is to try and coordinate the stroller time with snack time. This helps prevent your child from getting in an added snack (which could displace their later meal). Look at these suggestions for coming up with a feeding schedule that best supports your family.
If a snack is needed, pick ones that buy you bonus time. In diaper bags, we tend to grab and go with those easy, prepackaged snacks that offer dense sources of nutrition: the healthy muffin, LARABAR, fruit pouch they can suck down in a pinch, etc. When needing a stroller snack however, think of which foods take your child longer to eat and are less filling with each bite. Because although sometimes you need your child to consume the calories more efficiently, that isn’t usually what parents want with stroller snacks. That’s exactly why parents love puffs and the teethers or baby mum mums - because they don’t fill a small child up but will usually give them something to enjoy for just long enough, when needed. So because this is one of the few times when mom to mom, I know a longer than normal snack time might be needed, leverage such options to make that snack stretch longer so they need fewer snacks (again, making them less likely to disrupt a later, more well-balanced meal).
TRY THESE EASY STROLLER SNACK IDEAS: This is one of my favorites for littles (big brothers and sisters get a kick out of enjoying this too!). Get a dry water bottle and add a dry snack option inside. With this, you don’t have to stick to puffs past infancy. Instead, your options are endless! They can add dried fortitied cereal (like Cheerios, Chex, or Kix) or Love Grown unsweetened Power O’s with freeze-dried berries, fresh blueberries, or Harvest Snap/Inner Pears. Then, just shake it (with the lid on), tip it (to try to get some on their own), or you can help give them a few of a given item at a time.
Before dinner snacks
It is one of the most common complaints I hear from families: a child is melting down right when we need to make dinner, so we feel tempted to toss them a pack of fruit snacks to just make the whining stop.
But consider another way: Appetizer hour.
Just as an appetizer helps to hold us over at a restaurant before a meal is ready, we can adopt an “appetizer hour” approach in our own homes - on occasion or on a nightly basis. This offers your children something to eat, while still leveraging the very principles of filling in nutritional gaps.
So just as a salad would be a common option at a restaurant, lean on that versus let’s say, the fried mozzarella cheese sticks as an appetizer. This will help use your child’s peaking appetite to your advantage so that they can learn to like the options offered more so than they might, say, at times of day where they feel a little less desperate!
This is also often easier to have prepped and ready in the fridge than say, dinner itself, but offers a greater opportunity to fill nutritional gaps than say, a granola bar or handful of crackers does. See my snack drawer post for more on fruits or veggies that can be good for appetizer hour!
TRY THESE EASY APPETIZER HOUR SNACK IDEAS: Pull out any fresh fruits or veggies you have on hand. You can prep these in advance (as I share here), or you can take a shortcut and buy ready-made veggie trays (that come in a variety of sizes) to have these already ready-to-eat once they get home from the store. This reduces the amount of each veggie you have to buy at the store (cutting down on waste) and gives your family a no-excuse approach to ensuring you have something ready when dinner is cooking! Offer with a Greek yogurt ranch dip, hummus, or add a little lemon and honey to plain yogurt to offer with fruit. If your child is still learning to like vegetables but you’d like to try this idea of an appetizer to first address the behavioral side of snacks before dinner, start first with an appetizer plate of fruits and/or other love it foods. Then you can gradually continue to add in more vegetables to the mix as the behavior is adopted and becomes more well received.
Bedtime Snacks
Feeding expert Ellyn Satter has a phrase I love when it comes to picking out bedtime snacks. She says,
“Make it something filling but not thrilling”
That way, if you are tempted to bribe, coerce, or force your child to eat more at dinner so they don’t go to bed hungry), you can maintain your role in the Division of Responsibility. With this, you will know and be able to calmly include in your routine a bedtime snack that is basic enough it doesn’t get them excited about the bedtime snack more than the dinner foods. It is simply another opportunity to eat before bed, if you deem that necessary and/or appropriate (based on how much time occurs between dinner and bedtime). Ideally, you want about two hours between dinner time and bedtime before offering another snack. This will help your child to eat, if truly hungry, at dinner rather than holding out for a snack too soon afterwards. If their dinner goes untouched, you might feel inclined to offer them their plate again later as the bedtime snack. This can work for some families; just be sure you are using it as a way to minimize food waste and not to pressure your child into eating what was already offered.
Bedtime snacks is something that often comes up with families in The Academy, as they wonder if/when they should offer one, where to offer one, how to best offer one (to promote eating competence at dinner), and what options best fill their child’s nutritional gaps for the day. While we can’t get into all the ins and outs of bedtime snacks on this post, see this post for more guidance on whether or not a bedtime snack makes sense for your family.
TRY THESE EASY BEDTIME SNACK IDEAS: By the end of the day, you might have a pretty good gauge on which food groups and/or nutrients your child has eaten the most versus least of during the day. That’s why I encourage families in The Academy to use this final eating opportunity of the day to offer those foods your child might have eaten fewer of. So while cheese and crackers is a fine bedtime snack option, if you know your child has eaten plenty of cheese and/or crackers that day, maybe instead consider if a green smoothie, piece of whole grain toast with nut-butter spread, a bowl of oatmeal with nuts and dried fruit, or veggies or pea crisps with hummus would help to round out their day more. Again, we want these options “filling not thrilling.” Since I know my kids LOVE cheese and crackers, that is not an ideal bedtime snack in our home. Consider instead like it food options, such as those you know your child might eat if truly hungry but not necessarily ones they’ll skip dinner to later enjoy instead.
As mentioned at the beginning, there are a lot of possible scenarios that can play out around if/whether your child even needs a snack. So while I helped you work through that question itself in this post and gave you some common gray areas that can occur in this post, be sure you are signed up to receive more snack advice in the coming weeks here.
Also, make sure you are signed up for the upcoming Summer round of Muffin Clubs! Muffins can offer an easy, nourishing snack option any time of day.
For more on establishing structure and routine or seeing on if/where these snacks might fit in your family’s daily rhythms and routines, please see the following posts: