Does prepping after school snack take a little bit of planning and/or effort? Yes. But here’s why it’s worth it.
Fact: The kids come home from school HUNGRY.
Fact: Dinner’s not ready. (Or, your family eats together a bit later)
Fact: If snack isn’t ready, the kids are raiding the pantry and eating whatever they find first.
At least, that’s how it goes in our house. So every day, the hungry kids were grabbing whatever they saw first. Usually, it was the chips-cookies-candy that they saw and reached for first. They ate their fill, but it didn’t leave them, on the whole, feeling satisfied. The artificial ‘full’ feeling they felt crashed soon after, leaving them irritable, hungry for dinner (it wasn’t ready), and grumpy.
So something had to change.
In general, I follow the Division of Responsibility (DOR) model of feeding my children. Crash course: Mom provides the ‘what’ we’re eating, ‘where’ we’re going to eat, and ‘when’ it’s time to eat. Child decides ‘whether’ or not to eat, and ‘how much.’ For more about the DOR model, read this post.
So it was a pretty natural transition for me to ‘DOR’-ize snack time too. Here’s how it works. At some point before the kids get home, I prep snack. If you arrive home after them or with them, you can do it the night before and leave it in the fridge, but I usually do it a few minutes before they walk in.
Snack is a fruit or vegetable + a protein + a starch.
That’s it! That’s the whole formula! I try to have a variety of all three stocked in the house because variety is first of all, exciting, and it also helps expose kids to more kinds of foods. I make a platter in the middle of the table, put out small plates, and everyone helps themselves. Do some kids only grab the starch? Sure. Do some kids still kvetch that they want x-y-z? Yup. That’s okay.
Once I started having snack ready, I noticed something else too. When the kids were coming in, instead of splintering off to do their own thing (mostly fight, let’s be real), we started the afternoon sitting at the table together. I bring my coffee and it’s an amazing family bonding activity.
Want to try it? While you can use anything in your fridge/pantry, here are some of our favorites.
Proteins: Nuts, hard-boiled eggs, cheese (shredded in a cup, sliced), nut butters, squeezy-yogurts, bottled yogurt smoothies
Fruits/Vegetables: If you take the time to cut up your produce, it goes soooo much faster. Instead of just putting out an apple or peach, I’ll cut it into slices. Grapes get broken into mini bunches, oranges get peeled and halved, cucumbers get sliced into fries, and peppers go into rings. Kids will naturally start enjoying a wider variety of fruits and veggies when it’s sitting there, readily available and easy to grab.
Starches: Everyone’s favorite! Cookies, oatmeal squares, graham crackers, tortilla chips, corn chips, crackers. (You’ll be surprised though…this might draw them to the platter, but once they’re there, they’ll eventually be more receptive to the proteins and veggies too.)
Use your own platter, use a regular plastic plate, or level up with these options, below. Enjoy!
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