The constant feeding / snacking of children

If you feel strongly enough have the balls to say something to the mum not talk shit about them on Mumsnet. People can’t pretend to care this much then not even say anything when you see it!

She wasn't complaining about the time. She described the junk they were eating, and I think we can assume her own children are being offered something more healthy.as a snack.

Some posters have waved the OP off with 'it's society', but what is society in the context of poor diet and the resultant health issues? It's individuals en masse all making poor choices. Criticising individual choices is appropriate.

I'm not against my children having "junk" crisps, sausage rolls, biscuits etc on occasion, but I must admit I do judge those parents I see walking to school with their kids in tow eating pringles, doritos, and the like for their breakfast! And yes it happens a lot! I saw one child eating a hotdog on the way to school last week which blew my mind.

I hope people dont think this of my young child who has type 1 diabetes, snacking is often necessity to manage hypos or to avoid them.

Bold of you to assume my kid doesn’t eat proper meals because she has plenty of snacks 😂. My daughter is 3, has 3 solid meals a day and would snack all day if I let her but yeah she does eat pretty much constantly if we’re in the house. She’s fit and active though and a healthy weight so it’s not something I get worked up about.

So your body reacted entirely normally. It can cope with those spikes so you learned nothing .

For a diabetic this information is valuable, if you’re not diabetic all it tells you is “when I eat carbs my blood sugar spikes in an entirely normal manner and returns to baseline in a normal manner too”

I ho early despair of non diabetics thinking they need to track their blood sugar. The Glucose Goddess has made a mint out of you all.

Schools don’t have any additional snacking than they have done for at least the past 5 decades.
Childcare providers do one morning snack, almost always fruit, and an afternoon tea which is cheese and crackers, a toasted crumpet and crudities, beans and half a small potato in cold weather etc.

Well I wouldn't be paying for steak for a kid who wasn't likely to eat it.... I'd give them a taste of mine so they can try and then maybe next time

I wonder whether snacking is encouraged by childcare settings and schools so they don't have to deal with grumpy children if they are a bit hangry?

But it seems to have got a bit extreme, with these implications that if your kid doesn't snack you're somehow damaging them. If a kid has never snacked and isn't getting hunger pangs/headaches, I don't see the problem? Some HVs act like it's virtually child abuse.

And poor quality meals and snacks that spike you're blood sugar actually make you hungry, which sets of a vicious cycle of snacking. If you eat good quality balanced meals you rarely need snacks.

Is the issue here snacks or junk food?

I'd suggest it's both, @HotWheel5

There's nothing wrong with occasional snacks if a child's genuinely hungry - damn it there's nothing wrong even with junk food sometimes - it's the constant munching some do which seems so disturbing and does the real damage to metabolic health

There's also nothing wrong with a child feeling hungry if a decent meal's not too far off. Within reason it's a natural state, but tantamount to child abuse to some - ironically often those who seem relaxed about setting them up for a lifetime of obesity

But obviously lifestyle plays a huge role.
8am breakfast and 4:30 dinner is a very condensed eating schedule compared to the average. Most young children are having their breakfast well before 8am in order for their parents to drop them to childcare or before school club and commit to work, and then the flip side is the vast majority of families are not able to sit down for anywhere near a 4:30 window so inevitably snacking is more needed if children have an additional 3-4 hours during the days between main meals.

Definitely recommended by our health visitor and school nurse. Yeah mine doesn't always eat his either, or his lunch for that matter, to desparate to run around with his friends. But like yours he's a big lad so I don't worry. I thought you meant you actively didn't offer snacks

Just to clarify, I always send a snack to school, he doesn't always eat it. At preschool he wouldn't eat anything at all but he was only there for 3 hours at a time. He's 98th centile for height and a healthy weight so I don't think I need to be worried, although I hadn't realised it was recommended to give all children snacks!

Fruit, bread sticks and rice cakes don't keep your blood sugar level though, they spike it because they're full of carbs and little else (i was really surprised to see this when I had a week with a glucose monitor. I'm not diabetic). So much 'professional' advice around food is actually bollocks.

Cheese or nuts would be much better although schools obviously don't allow nuts.

Constant grazing really annoys me. It's not surprising so many children hardly eat at mealtimes because they're full from the constant snacking. I know how hard it is to stick to three main meals and two snacks because I have a 5 year old who would happily spend the whole day snacking, but it's a part of parenting to enforce rules around food and one of them is that no one needs to eat every 20 minutes.

Is the issue here snacks or junk food?

Struggling to see what the issue is with a kid having a banana or a rice cake with some soft cheese on en route from school to swimming. School lunches at primary are often around 11:45am and tea might not be until 5:30 or 6pm if a couple of kids are swimming. I would be hungry with that gap especially if I was exercising.

I can though see what the issue is with kids routinely having a packet of crisps and a packet of biscuits en route from school to swimming. I think these are 2 entirely different things though?

Well that's both unusual and not what health visitors etc recommend. A health snackis good for keeping blood sugar level in busy kids. Obviously I'm not saying send a packet of crisps daily but at our primary school induction we're advised to send a healtht break time item, our head teacher always says they don't police it but the general guidelines mist parents follow is fruit, bread sticks, rice cake, cereal bar type thing mon-rhues then a biscuit or crisps on a Friday. Which the 3 yrs my son has been at school has been my experience.

Obviously up to you but I'd say kids not having a break time snack are in the minority

Uff don’t even get me started on kids menus - I detest those and my kid has never eaten from those. He can read now so last week we stayed at a nice hotel and went to have breakfast. They gave him the kids menu (7yr old) he looked at the lady and said ‘I don’t like these things’ (pancakes, waffles, cereal). He ordered eggs, smoked salmon and toast.
he always has a big breakfast and doesn’t like eating/ snacking until lunch. I had to have an argument with the teacher at the start of the school year as she saw snack time as socialising and he didn’t want to eat anything 🙄. What does she want me to do if he doesn’t want to snack??

But why do they recommend this? It wasn't always the case.

My brother and I raised our kids in the 2010s and dutifully gave them loads of (healthy) snacks as that's the advice we were given. The kids then inevitably didn't eat their meals which led to stress all round. I couldn't help thinking all the bloody snacks didn't help. Maybe we were giving them too much in a portion, but there's not a lot of advice on that and his kids were given loads at nursery.

My mum couldn't understand it, she said when she had us in the 70s we had 3 meals a day and that was it (although i remember an occasional biscuit it certainly wasn't every day).

Its like a kid being slightly hungry is now seen as an unacceptable thing, when surely being too full to eat proper meals is worse?

All the people saying "stop being so judgemental" etc - yeah that's fine, but 1 in 5 children in the UK are obese by end of primary school. Obese, not chubby, not puppy fat. We're talking apnoeas at night, can't breathe well/run around in the day, fatty liver disease, fatty heart, metabolic issues, blood sugar issues. You're concerned about the parents' feelings - you should be concerned about the children's feelings. They are being massively, massively failed, at a societal and individual level. And they are very unlikely to recover from such a lousy start.

The effects of obesity are impacting the health service. There are teens being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes and other diseases that are typically related to excess weight. For many young people this was preventable and results are lifelong. Excess weight is linked to chronic health issues.
Peoples taxes are going into fund the NHS therefore it becomes a societal issue. A society getting progressively unhealthier does have knock of effects on everyone else.

We've had to, I got my husband to speak to her too but then she gets all wounded and passive aggressive. Nothing overt but still enough to make life unbearable when we see them. The kids love it though, there's also the huge amount of plastic tat she buys them and clutters up my house to end in landfill. I could rant all day.

He does sometimes have a mid morning snack now he's at school but didn't at preschool. It would have been milk at 7, breakfast at 8, lunch at 12, dinner at 4:30-5 and milk at bedtime, occasionally cereal then too if he was hungry. Obviously I didn't refuse to feed him, I just didn't routinely offer snacks between meals after a certain age.

I have a mixed view here because I dont agree with kids eating copious amount of processed/junk food, or eating food when they dont even ask for it/say their hungry, I dont see an issue with children having healthier choices to snack on when they need it.

You also have to factor in the lifestyle of children aswell so children who are very active either always out doing things i.e. lots of walks, softplay, or taking part in a sport etc. I could imagine they are getting hungry fairly quickly and will need top ups for the energy they are using up. Children who are hardly ever given the opportunity to go outside to play and explore who stay in constantly sat down/gaming/watching TV generally living a mostly sedentary lifestyle but are still constantly eating well id agree thats far from ideal.