My 4 Tricks for Getting Kids to Eat Healthier Snacks

Snacking is a shockingly controversial topic in the parenting world.

Some parents are vehemently anti-snack. And some parents let their kids go hogwild.

The truth is: no matter what your approach is, as long as you’re approaching it from a mindset of wanting the best for your kids, that’s great. Do what works for you!

But I know for me, I’ve always stressed a little bit about what Forrest eats in a day. Like most 4-year-olds, he can be really picky. Kids don’t have a lot of control over their day-to-day lives so food is often the one thing they can control. Plus, they like routine and all the things being pretty similar day-to-day. Almost all kids (except the few outliers, you lucky ducks!) have a few (or quite a few) foods they simply won’t touch (Forrest’s are broccoli and potatoes).

Snacks are a great way to teach kids good habits—not just to pick foods that help them meet their nutritional goals, but also to have fun with food and to let their body’s needs guide their choices. However, making sure kids have access to a good mix of snacks—both the fun stuff and the good-for-you stuff—can be really challenging.

Here are my 4 tips for helping kids pick healthier snacks every day. (As a note, these are just a few things to try! Different things, as always, will work for different families. Experiment, find what works, and don’t stress too much about it!)

1. Focus on what your kids already like.

I am a picky eater and I can remember what it was like for me when my mother tried to force me to try new foods or eat new foods. It was stressful and it created a lot of anxiety in me. Especially with snacks, I always wanted to eat the same things over and over: chips and salsa; Cheerios; and maybe an apple with peanut butter.

Forrest is definitely not as picky as I was, but he definitely has different tastes. Whereas I would have happily lived on mashed potatoes (and only mashed potatoes) as a child, he hates potatoes in all forms: fries, roasted, mashed, whatever, he doesn’t like potatoes. However, he does love fruit and yogurt; he will eat fruit and yogurt pretty much always.

The solution? Snacks of fruit and yogurt. Freeze yogurt tubes for afternoon snacks on hot days. Keep cut up apples and peaches in the fridge. We always have apples and strawberries on hand, as well as mangos, peaches, and other seasonal fruits. Forrest is probably never going to be a kid who happily accepts carrots as a snack—but he will eat strawberries and peaches, a smoothie, or some yogurt with fruit and granola.

This has been one of the best things for my anxiety around food and making sure the snacks Forrest eats are at least 80% nutritionally sound most of the time: instead of trying to form his tastes into ones that help me tick all those boxes (5 servings of veggies? check!), I just work with what he likes—rather than what he’s still learning to like.

2. Offer variety and choices.

There are actually 2 ways to approach snacks in your house.

1. Presenting a schedule at the beginning of each day that lists what’s for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and what is for morning and afternoon snack. And that’s it.

2. Giving them choices (just 2 choices, not all the choices) throughout the day at each mealtime and snack time.

How you approach this really depends on your child and their personality—as well as how well they’ve handled quarantine. (Isn’t that true for all of us?)

For us, I try to give choices. Here’s an example of what I say:

“This morning for breakfast, you can have oatmeal with apples or peanut butter toast with peach slices and granola. Which one sounds better?” Then, Forrest gets to choose—and he knows he always will be able to help me make breakfast.

At snack time, this is what I might say:

“For snack, you can have some cheese puffs and apple slices or yogurt with strawberries. Which sounds best right now?”

It’s really easy to get stuck in the rut of doing the same thing every day for kids. And some kids definitely thrive under that kind of structure. However, it can easily lead to boredom and kids begging for other snacks that you don’t necessarily want them to have every single day.

3. Make healthy snacks accessible.

One of the best things I ever did was make a little shelf for Forrest in the fridge that he can easily reach; it has his water bottle, juice boxes, and yogurts available 24/7. He also has access to our fruit bowl whenever he wants. We have a very simple rule in our house: if he wants a snack sometime other than our usual snack times, he can always have fruit, a yogurt, water, or a juice box—and he can get it himself. I will often find him happily eating a blueberry yogurt or eating an apple while playing with his Legos. It just makes my life so much easier and lets him know that, if he’s hungry, he is always allowed to access these spots no matter what.

4. Don’t restrict snacks.

Regarding point 3, I know for many parents, they feel they need to limit snacking. Especially if they’re worried their children are snacking more out of boredom than anything else. However, I’m trying to teach Forrest that it’s ok to listen to your body and some days, you just need more food than others! He is a very active child and he needs more food somedays. That’s just the reality of life. And while I definitely want him to make choices that make his body feel good, I never want him to feel like he is being deprived or not allowed to eat.

I have noticed this works with Forrest and lots of other kids; if they’re asking for a snack incessantly, it’s probably because they’re hungry. Even if dinner is 10 minutes from being done, they’re small humans and they only know they are hungry right then. I will usually put together whatever I have ready for dinner then; let’s say I’m making BLTs with cucumbers and watermelon. Well, the cucumber and watermelon are ready, so they can munch on those while I finish putting together the sandwiches. There is nothing wrong with doing that.

If kids are begging for snacks in between meals, or in between snacks, I often ask what sounds good and offer a few alternatives. If they all want popsicles, that’s a fairly easy thing to offer! Plus, popsicles can help with hydration—always a great choice during the summer. You can also offer a variety of snacks, like some cheese puffs, a yogurt, a few strawberries, and a juice box and see what they end up picking. It’s not like you can’t save whatever they don’t eat to go with lunch or for the next snack.

The Moving Diaries: Is It Normal to Feel Sad?

5 years ago, Danny & I bought our first home together. It wasn’t perfect. There were a lot of things, right from the get go, that we didn’t love. We had our home built on land I already owned, so we considered it our forever home.

Fast forward a few years: several job changes, a pregnancy, a newborn turned toddler turned preschooler… and suddenly that house just wasn’t right anymore. It felt tiny. We were cramped, on top of each other, and the prospect of adding another child felt absolutely impossible.

A year ago, we decided to build a second home. We would make better decisions this time! We will pick a better plan, build in a better spot, do all the things we didn’t last time. (I will write more about the process of building your own home later. I know this is a totally privileged thing that many people can’t imagine, so just know, if you’re gaping at your computer, I totally acknowledge that.)

Our home was completed last week. It was about 2 or 3 weeks behind schedule by that point. And when I say completed, I don’t mean… “completed.” It wasn’t really completed. (Again: I can write about this later.)

But either way, we started moving our things out of our home into our new forever home. I was ecstatic.

We moved things for 3 days in the evenings: piece by piece, it felt like the slowest process ever. But there was only so much we could do as two people! On Friday, we went to IKEA to buy some new furniture (including a new kitchen table) and then thankfully Danny’s parents arrived and helped us move boxes and furniture.

Friday night, we all slept in our new home for the first time. Forrest’s room was mostly put together, but in our room, we only had our mattress on our box spring on the floor (our bed frame is still on a delivery truck somewhere!). I had a suitcase and my toiletries and that was about it.

I told Danny, “it feels like we are on a really weird, shitty camping trip.” That feeling isn’t helped by the fact that our contractor hasn’t really finished our upstairs toilet in the master bathroom (again, more on this later!) and 50% of our possessions are still in a different house.

My anxiety was high Friday night. Like really high.

Remus is also an anxious being (in that specifically hyper chocolate lab sort of way), so he woke me up 3 times during the night. He would run outside and pee, then look at me as if asking, “Can we go home?”

And at 3am, my last wake up, I briefly thought: let’s just go home. I started to panic. Do I really want to live in this strange house that doesn’t smell like me? Do I really want to leave all my memories behind?

I thought of all the memories I have of our old house. I let Remus back inside, locked the patio door, went upstairs, and cried while Danny slept. I panicked and cried and felt horribly sad.

I thought of bringing Forrest home—anxious, swollen, bleeding, looking wretched—and seeing the sign my sister-in-law Amy made and put on our front door. I remember sitting upstairs with him, pumping and feeding him, while my family sat downstairs. I thought of the hours I spent holding him during naps on the couch: the light shining through our windows in such a specific way.

I thought of painting our living room wall grey last summer, our breakfasts in our kitchen, standing at the counter making Christmas cookies with Fo.

For once, I thought not of all the things that I didn’t like about that house (the cramped layout, the lack of a closet in the master bedroom, the teeny tiny bathrooms) and I thought about all the things I loved. Sitting with Forrest in his room, reading him Harry Potter. Being in his room when he was 2 weeks old and wouldn’t stop crying and not knowing what to do. The long nights I spent awake and pumping. The sink where I washed all his bottles. Seeing him walk for the first time. Getting home from Disneyland with him and being so relieved and sad.

When Danny finally woke up, I told him I felt panicked. I think a lot of it was the feeling of being totally overwhelmed: we still have so much to pack and move and I feel rushed and anxious to get it done. I want to do it, but I also wish I could hand off the wheel and let someone else (anyone else!) do it! Mostly, I just felt sad.

Danny assured me that this seemed normal: we’re in a new house that doesn’t feel like “us” yet even though it is very “us”. We will get used to it and we will love it.

The same feeling hit me later on Saturday. (I’m actually typing this up Saturday, so it’s a particularly fresh memory.) I ran to the old house one last time—at 8pm, of course—to get my computer. I needed, in order to feel sane, to set up my computer. To get all my desk things and arrange them on my new desk and sit and work and feel normal. I went to the house and packed up my office… then I went into Forrest’s room.

Forrest has gotten a big bed in the new house. He’s incredibly proud of it. But in his old bedroom, his toddler bed is still sitting there, along with some of his toys and some boxed up clothes. About half his books are still there too. (Like I said, so much to move still!) I collected up all his clothes to pack into the car and as I walked out of his room, I started to cry. Again.

It hit me like a wave. To me, that was Forrest’s room. It always will be. I took all his weekly and monthly progression photos in that room on his chevron carpet. I rocked him to sleep every single night for two years—and have read him a story and sang him 3 songs every single night for about 1 and a half more. That room is his room: it feels like him, it smells like him. But we’re emptying it out, shaking out all the things that are Forrest to make into a new space. And while he loves his new room, I can’t help but think of him crawling across the floor, the nights I ran in when I heard him sick and crying, reading him Harry Potter while he drank his last bottle for the night. That toddler bed will be moved to the new house and have the front put back on in anticipation of a new baby: one I don’t know yet, who will fill our lives the way Forrest does.

Moving is hard. As someone said to me on Twitter, moving is nothing but trauma. Change is hard and locational change is particularly difficult for me, someone who is incredibly anchored by my physical space. Not being able to clean and organize the way I want makes it hard for me to feel anything but adrift.

I don’t know if it’s totally normal to be sad over moving. I cried when I moved out of all of my college dorms, however; I cried when I left my college apartment. I cried when I drove away from Caldwell, Idaho, a town I had viscerally hated for 4 years (and now return to on vacations at least twice a year). I cried when I moved out my parents’ house. I cried when I moved in our old house. I suppose for me it is normal, but it feels like this time it has hit me a lot harder than it did before.

It’s a total cliche, but it’s true: moving is hard. It stresses everyone out. And now being the one in charge of the moving (no one is holding my hand and helping me make these decisions!), it’s even more stressful.

I don’t have a real clear message to end this post on. It’s a much more personal one than I usually post. I guess what I’m saying is: I don’t know if it’s “normal” to feel sad when you’re moving, but with emotions running so high, I can’t imagine it’s a new phenomenon either. If you’re moving and feeling sad, tell me about it!