We all know that a good breakfast helps you start the day right, but what about the other meals? For kids, who seem to be constantly growing, every meal is important so there are lots of reasons why giving them a hot lunch when they come home from school is a great idea.
Nutritional Benefits
Yum! A hot lunch at home can be nutritious and delicious.
First of all, there’s the nutritional side. When kids take lunch to school, they are often tempted to barter the items they don’t like for something that’s more appealing but this new item might not be as healthy. That means the time you spent creating a balanced lunch is wasted. Some kids simply discard the items they don’t want. If they are buying meals at school, they will avoid the items they don’t like (these are often the healthiest) and eat more of the ones they do. It’s a natural impulse, but you can curb this by providing a hot lunch at home. Cooking lunch at home lets you select foods from the food pyramid to ensure that your child has a balanced diet. The right combination of grains, vegetables, fruits, milk and meat and beans will help your kids to grow.
Family Time
For involved parents, lunch time is also a great time to hear about your kids’ day so far. Often, when you try to find out what has happened at the end of the day, you get monosyllabic answers or grunts. Your kids are tired and don’t even want to think about school any more. In the middle of the day, they are still feeling bright, and are happier to chat with you. It’s a good opportunity for you to find out about issues with other kids, with teachers and classes and with activities and projects as they happen rather than after the fact. This is a great time to bond with your kids and to chat to them without the pressure of having homework to complete. Sure, they’re on a deadline, but if lunch is ready when they get there, you’ll have plenty of quality time left to talk after they’ve wolfed it down.
Not only do hot meals give kids energy, but there’s an added bonus in feeding their brains. Children who are well nourished are likely to perform better in school. There are parts of the world where children don’t receive daily hot meals and this has been shown to reduce intellectual development. So why take the risk? Provide body food and brain food for your child in the form of a daily hot meal at lunch time.
Tips and Tricks
And what if you don’t have time to cook a hot meal from scratch every day? Remember when your kids were babies and were starting to eat solid food? Many baby books recommend preparing batches of food that you can heat as needed and the same principle applies when your children are older. While vegetables are probably better fresh (and only take a short time to steam), you can easily do a mega-batch of pasta at the start of the week and make this the basis for the week’s hot lunches.
This was a guest post by Josh who is a marketing director at Kids Chair World , a company that sells kids chairs & tables.
Parenting viewpoints from parents in the trenches, because parenting doesn’t come with a manual. In addition to