The constant feeding / snacking of children

Eating disorder OP? Seem rather too aware of what others are eating near you!! Myb

After swimming my kids always got a twix out of the vending machine as still talk about it! All of my kids (now 31, 23 and 15) are slim and have healthy eating habits.

“I stand by snacking is inherently problematic but crisps and biscuits as a snack seems excessive and sitting in the pushchair munching constantly is not teaching good food habits.
Food is fuel, not to keep children quiet.”

this is such a disturbing attitude to food. Do you have an eating disorder? Only growing up in an eating disordered household will be so damaging to your children

Try having a 9 year old gymnast, who trains up to 20 hours per week and has a small appetite. She loves healthy food, hates fatty meat and excess oil, but the girl needs calories, sometimes those come from less healthy sources, but the biggest concern is her losing weight and muscle mass. She has a nutritionist.

My sister was like this with my niece. Always had to have a selection of snacks to hand wherever they went. As though my niece would simply wither and expire without one. She never had to wait for a meal and probably never felt real hunger as she was constantly grazing. She learnt that if she said was hungry (even after a meal) and ask for snacks and said snacks or “treats” would appear. No surprise she is now a very overweight 13 year old. It’s a shame.

Oh god it's the pious anti-snack nonsense again. Look it's not IF you snack it's HOW you snack.

My fit and healthy kids have always snacked. They are 9 and 11 now, they do 3 sports each.

For after school snack I have a list stuck to the fridge of things they can help themselves to, namely toast, corn cakes, crackers, oat cakes, fruit, cheese, peanut butter, yoghurt, dried fruit/nuts/seeds. They have something or nothing depending on their hunger levels. We have full meals and they are not fussy. I don't refuse them snacks as long as it's a long while to mealtime, if I'm actively cooking in the kitchen I tell them to wait. They don't over-eat, and they eat pretty much everything (lots of soups, curries, stews in my house, vegetables galore)

On Fridays they- Shock! Horror! Get some treats... So I put a biscuit/chocolate/whatever in their lunchbox on that day and then later before swimming I get them ANOTHER TREAT (last week they had chocolate pretzels. This week we are going to our local ice cream place for a scoop of gelato) They then swim (hard) for an hour.

Have I contributed to a public health crisis yet?

This made me laugh 🦕🦖🤣x

I don't like kids snacking and rarely offer snacks, and I cook healthy food at home. I'm often shocked at the volume of food other people's kids are eating. However, one of my kids is slim, the other is overweight. So it's made absolutely no difference.

Maybe the child needs a snack because they get small school dinners and that is a long gap before dinner. What does piss me off is parents don't bring snacks and then their kids are begging mine for theirs.

Yeah coz, wannabe middle class superiority 😂

Well also the way life goes there is no real reason either child would be judged healthy or unhealthy.
At that age health tends to be down to luck, youngsters rarely get lifestyle related health problems. Plenty of healthy kids eat the coco pops diet.

THOSE ARE SNACKS 😂😂😂😂😂

Your "supper" of a crumpet is the same as someone else's snack crumpet at 4pm

You've just swapped it round and called it supper 😂😂😂😂

Not necessarily. A child that eats Coco pops for breakfast, chocolate spread sandwich, wotsits and fizzy drinks for lunch, then cheap processed dinners and sits around all day on Xbox, but doesn't snack will not be in better health than a child who has Porridge, apple snack, wholemeal vegetable pasta for lunch, some cheese and a few nuts in the afternoon a new mackerel, salad and boiled potatoes, that goes outside playing, running and jumping around for 4-5 hours a day

Not snacking isn't automatically better health.

How can eating something you like be pointless?

Out of interest, why is a crumpet or a pancake better than a biscuit?

Supper is usually a bowl of cereal/crumpets / pancakes. Fruit and cheeses. Etc. Glass of milk.

They don't get crisps and biscuits as a supper.

That's because you give them a snack at 6/7 pm...

DC in my house are fed a home cooked meal 4pm or 4.30pm and they have supper 6/7pm if still hungry. We don't offer snacks in the afternoon.

Pointless.

My children didn’t snack like that.

they were obese though. So it’s probably not the snacks

🙄🙄🙄 have you ever tried to take your eldest to a swimming lesson and have the youngest two just sit nicely next to the pool for half an hour. Spoiler, it’s hell. Let that poor parent do what they need to do to get through it and leave them alone.

I’m with you op - constant snacking and far too much water (more than we had in the 80’s is good but it’s getting ridiculous)

Ooh a highland toffee bar takes me right back to the swimming pool vending machine in 1980

I think you've hit the nail on the head here with regards to what is making kids unhealthy- it's lack of movement more than consuming snacks.

Two bits of evidence I think about.

1. in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, plenty of kids were scoffing down sweets after school. Penny sweets were the norm, and chocolate bars were bigger by weight back then too. Plus many children ate meals that were very basic and not that balanced- my dad commonly ate thick bread and dripping (beef fat) or jam.
   But these kids were very active and autonomous, walking home from school alone and biking to each other's housing. There was no "mum's taxi". You walked or biked in you were lucky enough to have a bike.

2. I live in Japan, the thinnest developed nation. Snacks are everywhere and super affordable. There are convenience stores all over the place and vending machines every 300m. It's normal for parks to have vending machines stocking soft drinks, but also sweet "soups" (red bean or corn potage), snacks like pocky. Bigger parks often have ice cream vending machines.

Again, compared with modern UK children, these kids are more active and autonomous. 6 year olds walk home from school on their own, meet up with mates, and go to the park. There's less of a culture of bringing people to your house, so the kids go out in public instead to socialise in free spaces like the children's hall where they can run around inside in the air conditioning, or the park.

Parks are really abundant too, with little pocket parks all over the place as most people don't have gardens. Crucially, many parks and convenience stores have free to use public toilets so kids can stay out playing longer.

Humans will always love snacking. It's literally how you function as a hunter gatherer, so baked into our DNA. We just need the movement to match.

I've been thinking about being able to sit at a table and use a knife and fork. When I was at school, in the 60s and 70s, almost every child ate a two-course hot meal at lunchtime. Few mothers worked outside the home and the norm was eating another meal in the evening, sitting at a table with a knife and fork. Food other than dry goods wasn't stored at home so you couldn't decide at 10pm that you fancied lasagne and have a portion defrosted and microwaved within 45 minutes. Biscuits or a bowl of cereal were pretty much the only choice.

Those norms have been replaced with more choice at school, with lots of children bringing packed lunches, and people eating separately in the evening because of different working patterns and the easy availability of ready meals, microwaves and delivered hot food. Unsurprisingly, there are children not taught to sit at a table and use a knife and fork. Katherine Birbalsingh at Michaela was quick to see that what was not being taught at home could be taught at school, in a partial return to what I was used to as a child.

It's not snacks per se that are the problem. It's snacks being given to children who are overweight. The low levels of breastfeeding in the UK don't help because a breastfed baby cannot over-eat so they learn to regulate their appetite and stop eating when they are full. If your child is a healthy weight or abit underweight like yours, snacks are not a problem.