4 // Are weekdays a hot mess with meals and snacks?
Are weekdays a hot mess with meals and snacks?
Get an easy win any day of the week with these 5 clues to structure, routine, and ending the constant request for a snack!
Wondering how to order your day so there are clear meals and snacks without the endless grazing, complaints about being hungry, and uncertainty around if and when to feed your child again?
Well tune in for this episode as we breakdown the five C's to setting up a meal and snack schedule. These aren't rules to follow but rather a routine that will help your family build trust, minimize food fussiness, boost confidence, and promote healthy habits.
Listen to this episode of The Veggies & Virtue Podcast now!
Full Episode Transcription
Please note this a raw transcription. If something doesn’t read correctly, toggle to that timestamp in the show so that you can listen in on what was actually being said!
00:00 Hey friend, and welcome back to the show. Today, we are going to be talking about how to create structure for meal and snacks. So if you feel like your child is coming out of infancy and you really are not sure what the goal is in terms of how often to be feeding them, or you have an older child who is constantly asking for snacks and yet eating really poorly at meals, today you are going to get the plan that you need to walk away with, how to create that schedule for meal and snacks and how to do so in a really effective way so that you know, the five Cs to creating meal and snack schedules that will work best for your family moving forward.
00:45 Hey mama, I'm Ashley, and welcome to the veggies and virtue podcast. In this podcast, you will find simple menu ideas, kitchen organizational systems spelled out for mom life and feeding tips and tricks that are both evidence based and grace laced. I believe that you can find flexibility when it comes to feeding your family so that you can feel calm, capable, and connected in the kitchen. As a registered dietitian and Christian mom of three myself, I want you to break free from the mealtime battles and to feel equipped while feeding your kids all day long. Pull up a stool at my kitchen counter. And let me pour you a cup of coffee and say a quick prayer for you. It's time to chat about the meal times, messes, moments and ministry of motherhood.
01:24 All right, ladies, I am excited to chat about this because I think something that is often a missed window and it can be a little tricky, honestly, is when does the WHEN take place? And that's the when of your role as a parent in the feeding relationship. If you remember from episode two, where we talked about the blueprint for feeding and best practices for feeding and dividing whose role is what between you and your child or your children, your job is what, when and where food is offered; your child is if/whether and how much they choose to eat. The reason I say that this is a tricky window though, is because in infancy as all of us know as moms, it's a little bit different. In infancy, the division of responsibility does adjust a little bit so that you are in charge of what is offered, whether you choose to offer formula or breast milk or a combination of the two, but ultimately the child often dictates when and where in that early responsive feeding relationship.
02:28 And so what we see happening is as a child transitions out of infancy and into early toddlerhood and ultimately childhood, sometimes families don't necessarily transition with that approach to having more sit down snack times and also just overall meal and snack structure. And so what we see happening is a child who's maybe around a year old and has maybe already incorporated three main meals in the day, is beginning to incorporate mini-meals or what we'll call for the purposes of this episode, snacks, into their day. And so as a child gets older, we want them to have transitioned to include maybe three meals and two to three snacks throughout the day. And this includes milk feedings, which is obviously a big part of an infant diet and is often part of the transition into toddlerhood as a child, may be weaning off of bottles or breast milk.
03:24 And so when this when happens is often a missed opportunity for families because they forget that they need as parents, they forget that they need to reclaim the when of the feeding relationship that is up to you as the parent, when meals and snacks are offered. You know, again, as we talk about this window of transitioning from infancy into toddlerhood one of the main selling points I can often get parents to wrap their heads around is just the safety component. You know, when we think about kids running around with a bottle, it doesn't seem quite as concerning to parents. But when we talk about young children running around with food in their hand, especially as their feeding skills begin to develop, any food can become much more hazardous to them if they're not seated in a specific space. And so when we talk about when and where, if we can start to transition kids to a sit down snack, and that obviously implies that the where is being taken care of, and there's somewhere that they're sitting down for a snack, but also it's consolidating when that snack is being offered. So if you haven't done this in this initial transition, let's say between like 12 and 24 months, or you may be years beyond this, it is okay. Because honestly, whether you have, you know, older infants, younger toddlers, older kids, whatever age range your kids might be at, the concept of setting up a meal and snack schedule can apply to you and can be really beneficial; the processes that we'll talk through today. Because even for a lot of our families, as you come off of a vacation or a holiday season or a time where your schedule is just off, schedules are something that are very simple and very objective to return to. So we are going to dive into how to set that up and I'm gonna walk you through what I consider the five Cs to setting up a meal and snack schedule. Before we jump into outlining the five Cs of setting up a meal and snack schedule, I want to quickly review some of the ways that you may know that this is something that your family even needs and why this is even important, because if you're new to establishing a division of responsibility, I know at first, even though the feeding approach is rather simple, that does not mean it's easy to establish.
05:39 And I recognize that even as a dietitian mom with, you know, now eight years of practice under my belt, this is not the easiest thing to do, but I do think that starting with the when as early as possible, again, the ideal would be as soon as your child is coming out of infancy and beginning to wean and sit down snacks are something that you're able to incorporate more into your day - that would be the ideal. Again, not saying that you can't go ahead and jump in with this, no matter what age your child is. But the reason that I think this is really important and that you'll find some of the reasons why you might need this, if this isn't something that you've done, is because if we look at some of the transitions that are also happening at this same time, we can see how a meal and snack schedule helps support the feeding environment that we're wanting to create for our child as they grow out of infancy and into becoming a more mature child and throughout their childhood.
06:40 And so when we look at post infancy and early toddlerhood, and what else is going on, if you look at your child's growth chart, you could very quickly see and identify that their growth rate slows down. They are not growing as fast as they were as infants. And with that, a few other things happen. We start to see that their appetite is often not as big. And so as we start to offer more table foods and to structure meals and snacks a little bit more, we're met with a child who's just not as hungry. And so with that, what we can start to see is that we either can cater to this and our child maybe, you know, might eat just small amounts and very quickly can start to adopt grazing like habits. Or we can see that we do try and sit 'em down for snacks or for meal times, but they become very distracted.
07:32 They maybe don't wanna stay in their seat. We may feel like we need to begin using pressure to get them to eat "enough" at that given eating opportunity. And with that, we also have a child who's developing more autonomy and a desire for independence and control. So we might see them having more protests. We might see them testing our boundaries more. We might see them expressing more pickiness because again, their appetite may be decreased paired with the increase of opinions. And this is also the window post infancy that we start to see some of the pickiness increase. And so we can see a lot of these things are physiologically happening for our kids already with their bodies and also with their stages of development. And so when we establish a meal and snack schedule as early as we identify that there is a need for one, which would be as soon as possible after infancy, the quicker we can start to remove the question of is it time for my kid to eat?
08:36 Because in infancy, we pick up on those hunger cues and their cries for needing more food. But as our children get older, they're developmentally able to begin having longer stretches of time in between meals and snacks. And we'll get into, you know, what that stretch of time looks like and things in a few minutes. But what I want you to consider is that an infancy, our children have an innate ability to self-regulate. That's part of the reason why we allow them to regulate when and where they're eating. And it creates a great opportunity for us to use that to our advantage moving forward. And we can continue to use their innate abilities to self-regulate, excuse me, I should say to self-regulate if/whether and how much they eat when food is offered, but we take the ownership of when and where and what that food being offered is.
09:29 So it becomes building trust in the feeding relationship, not just with them, learning to trust us that we will offer regular meal and snacks at routine times throughout the day and throughout the week. But equally, if not more importantly, it also equips our kids to trust themselves that they can go a certain stint of time without eating and without needing to eat on demand, because they are listening to their body they are tuned in to their hunger and fullness cues. And so when food is available, they begin to learn how to fuel themselves appropriately based off of how hungry or how full that they are, so that they can go enjoy all the other amazing opportunities and activities that kids continue to have exposure to as they get older. So you were probably ready for me to dive into how do we go about setting this up - this meal and snack schedule up - so that we can help our kids work through this, decrease their food
10:28 fussiness, increase some healthy habits, that'll help our whole family moving forward for years and years to come and minimize some of that grazing that can really interrupt productive, positive, pressure-free meal times. And so, like I mentioned, I have five C's for setting up a meal and snack schedule that I wanna run through with you today. So if you don't already, get out a pen and paper and jot this down so that you can follow along and ultimately personalize it and customize it to your family. So the first C is consolidate. And if you have found that your child either grazes throughout the day, or is constantly wanting snacks all morning, or they come home from after school and they're just kind of eating endlessly and then it interrupts their dinner, this is going to be especially important because what I want you to do in consolidating is the first step would be to determine the sleep and wake times of when your child's sleeping and when they're waking up.
11:25 And so we know they're not sleeping when they're eating, cross out those times. Next you're going to pencil in what would the normal meal times be depending on the age & stage of your child. There may be preset times if they go to preschool or elementary school. And, you know, there's built in breakfasts or lunches with that. I want you to go ahead and write that in. If you have a set dinner time that your family tries to shoot for, pencil that in. Obviously things might vary from day to day and with different activities and seasons and things like that. So you can make as many different renditions of this as you feel like you need, but for practice, just go with what is the most common routine for your family's day. And then next after you've penciled in what the normal meal times would be
12:09 I want you to look at what is the span between those meals and where is there an opportunity for a sit down snack. Ideally, we want this to happen about every two to three hours, and we'll get through all the nuances of this in future episodes. But for the intent of this episode, I want you to just go ahead and identify some spaces where a snack might be most appropriate. So, if you know, breakfast happens at seven and lunch is at noon. That's a five hour window that is longer than we want our child to go without having an opportunity to eat. So that's where you're going to pencil in a mid morning snack. And the same situation would be if, say lunch is at noon and you eat dinner at five or six, again, longer window than we wanna have. So cut that down to where it works out around their wake times, especially if your child has a nap.
13:03 So if you're gonna tell me here, well, it just seems like they're eating all morning because breakfast runs into snack time or equally if afternoon snack runs into dinner time, that should alert us that your meal times are too long. We in general, don't want to see that meals or snacks, or really any eating opportunity is taking longer than 30 minutes. And that's from the beginning of the meal to the end of the meal. Sometimes in infancy and even early toddlerhood, kids can take a little bit longer eating. And if you're seeing that your child actively involved and participating in the meal and continuing to eat, you don't need to cut them off necessarily. But where it becomes problematic is when a child is kind of dawdling or distractions are being used or they're watching TV, and it just kind of keeps dragging on that is not what we want, because one, that's not teaching mindfulness and it's not helping them
13:56 self-regulate within the eating opportunity window, but it's also helping, or excuse me, it's also hindering our ability to really create that structure and routine and ultimately rhythm for our overall day. And so definitely go ahead and put a cap on that. So once you've consolidated your meals, the second C is going to be consistency. If this is new for your family, I want you to take two weeks to try and implement this schedule. And that is important for both your child and their development of appetite regulation. If they're used to kind of grazing, and they're not used to operating having some sort of a meal and snack schedule, but during this time you're going to start observing, man, they seem really hungry this time of day, or this window just doesn't really seem to work, or maybe we should change the schedule or add a bedtime snack or push dinner back an hour.
14:53 All of those observations are so valuable and so unique to your family, and we'll have future episodes that dive into each of them individually. But for the intent of this episode, what I want you to walk away with is your meal and snack schedule set up and to be consistent in how you set it up for your family for the next two weeks as your child starts to have that appetite regulation, because what a gift for you to even start to recognize, they seem really hungry at this time, because without a meal and snack schedule, you really wouldn't know because they might just kind of been grazing whenever or you wouldn't maybe be as intentional about what you're offering or where or you're offering or when you're offering it. So instead of reacting during the first two weeks of having a mail and snack schedule, what I want you to do is just really reflect and take notes on this schedule, make notes of things that you don't just see kind of as a one-off, or it happened this one random day, which they didn't nap and a million other variables played in.
15:49 But if it's something that you consistently keep seeing, that cues you in, that you might need to adapt the schedule. The schedule is meant to serve you. You are not meant to serve your schedule. And so, as you observe your child's appetite regulation and their moments of more, less hunger throughout the day, you can adapt it, but give it weeks for you to get used to it and them to get used to it. And then the third C is to stay calm, because if you're not expecting pushback, I'm going to encourage you - expect some pushback, because they are kids and they push back on everything that we give them with boundaries and that's appropriate, it's developmentally expected. And so if you can just remind yourself to the best of your ability to stay calm and expect that pushback I think it'll really help you in setting up this meal and snack schedule. To help you do that
16:44 the fourth C I want you to consider is how to communicate these changes to your child. So the fourth C is communicate, and one of the best ways to stay calm, you know, they all, all parenting resources will tell us to stay calm and that's so much easier said than done. But if you have a clear one or two liner to communicate to your child, when it is, or more importantly, maybe is not an eating opportunity, it's a lot easier to stay calm and help to redirect them to something else. So have your script ready and be really clear. One that is very common and that I recommend often is just to say, simply the kitchen is closed. My kids seem to react a lot better if I say it in some like French or British accent, that's probably not appropriate or accurate at all, but my kids find it a little more lighthearted and push back a little bit less
17:33 when I remind them right now, the kitchen's closed. It's not time to eat. We'll eat again in 30 minutes. How about we go play X, Y, Z until whatever meal or snack might be happening next. And so have your script ready and communicate that to your child so that you are partnered up a little bit better. And then the fifth and final C is I want you to try to lead with confidence. Your fifth C is confidence. And that's because this is your role in the feeding relationship. After your child has grown through infancy and into toddlerhood, be confident that you are helping your child establish and cultivate the skills that they need to be really proficient, competent eaters as they grow up and mature. And so be confident that in your feeding relationship, even if they whine or they protest, or they push back, that setting these limits with love as a loving and confident leader is your job.
18:33 And your job is to determine what, when and where food is offered. So you can lovingly reassure them that they are safe, that they're supported, and that these limits are put in place with love to help nurture them and nourish them. So those are the five Cs and hopefully now you have at least a little bit of an outline of your average day with the wake times, the normal meal times, and you've added in when those snack times or those snack windows might be. I always say, add an "ish" to your schedule because nothing ever happens according to plans with kids. So know that this is intended to be flexible over time. It's absolutely adaptable to your family's seasons and stages of life. All right, we are already over on time. It always seems to fly by, but I promise I will get in the habit of being as articulate and concise as I can be.
19:27 But real quick, before we wrap up, I want to just say a quick prayer for you, and then we'll sign off for today. Lord, thank you so much for this time. Thank you for the ability to meet with these mamas and to just connect over something that we can all relate to. And Lord, as crazy as our days may sometimes feel God, I pray that you'll equip these mamas with the understanding and the knowledge of how to organize their day in a way that ultimately serves you, but also that serves their children and nourishing them and equipping them with the skills that they need to live full and vibrant lives. Lord, create space in our days to connect and have community around the table. And Lord, free us up for time away from the kitchen where we can do all the other good things that you've called us to do. Lord, be with these friends today, as they implement these next steps, give them the calmness Lord, give them the patience, the creativity, the communication skills, and ultimately the confidence that can only come from knowing you. In Jesus name. Amen.
20:36 It has been a joy having you on podcast today, and if you've enjoyed it as well, I have a quick favor to ask. Do you mind hopping over to apple podcast and leaving me a written review? This will only take you a hot second, but it truly blesses me every time I get to read what one of you write over there and it allows me to bless others through this podcast and the episodes to come. The other thing that you can do is to take a screenshot of this episode and tag me over on Instagram at veggies and virtue. I would love to see what action steps that you're taking from this episode, and also to support your family in the journey moving forward. Until next time, thanks for coming over to chat at my kitchen counter. Remember that you will always have a seat and a snack waiting for you here.
