Are all nursery meal and nap timings earlier than most families?

[CoffeeAddict81]

Just that really. Was looking at local nursery websites and the timings are all really early. Lunch at 11.15, dinner at 3.30. My baby has lunch at 1 and an afternoon snack at 3.30, and dinner at 6.

Has anyone else encountered this? Do you shift your whole family routine to adjust to the nursery timings, or do you somehow make it work for the days the baby is at nursery? She is only going part time, 2 days PW.

I’ve seen this at our nursery where LO is due to start in the summer - we were planning to basically reverse our current dinner and snack, so early dinner at nursery and then we will give a snack on picking up. Interested to hear views from others!

Ours is the same, we just give a snack after nursery pick up and he seems fine with that. On days when he's not at nursery we tend to keep to our usual lunch and dinner times and he's always dealt with that quite well

Yes I think most nurseries are on this kind of timing. It makes sense because the end of the day is usually between 5 and 6pm so they obviously can't give a dinner at a more usual dinner time as that would be pick-up time.

Ours is:
Breakfast ongoing between 8 and 9am, anyone who arrives before 9 gets breakfast.
Lunch about 11.30/11.45am.
Nap time 12pm+
Snack about 1.30/2pm
Dinner 3.30/3.45pm
Nursery closes at 6pm.

We've never changed our home timings to fit around nursery we just do what we want at home, she's never struggled with the different schedules. She's been in nursery since she was 9 months although she didn't nap on the nap schedule until about 18 months as before then she'd usually have two short naps at random times in the baby room. She's nearly 3 now and she dropped her nap at nursery a few months ago because they nap too early for her to be tired whereas at home she still naps 2-3pm.

My DD is almost 9 months old. At her nursery lunch is 12pm lunch and tea (dinner) at 4.00. I pick her up at 5.20 and she has dinner at home at 6 with her older sisters before bed at 7.

Yes ours is similar. Dd has a substantial snack afterwards, but it is a pain for when we have days off because she wants lunch at 11!

We just do snacks for tea after nursery. So they have breakfast, lunch and tea there with lunch being a proper hot meal and tea being things like beans, banana bread, cheese straws, crumpets etc about 4. So we just do a bit of a top-up on the three nursery days with more snack bits about 5.30 at home rather than a proper dinner.

Yes ours does this. DS only goes 2 days a week so we don't change our routine. I just give him some toast and fruit or something when he gets home

I think most are the same, they can't really give dinner at 5 as parents start picking up from around then, and they need the kitchen and place cleaned up for the day!

Lunch at 11.15 seems particularly early but I think DD has lunch at nursery at 12 which is still early for us. We do our routine on non nursery days. She has a hot meal at lunch at nursery and a snack tea around 4 so I give a supper type thing around 6 of maybe scrambled egg, pasta, beans on toast

Our nursery does breakfast at 8, snack at 9.30, lunch (hot meal) at 12. Then 2 snack times in the afternoon. One just fruit and the other something like scones, oatcakes etc. Also free access to a fruit bowl all day. So I tend to just give a small dinner portion or something like beans on toast for dinner on nursery days.

Ours is early too, lunch is 11:30-12:00 ish and tea is all done by 16:00 so we just give a bit of our tea at 17:30-18:00 if he wants it. Most of the time he has it but he is like a bin.

It does seem odd but small children do adapt. I wouldn't worry as long as he or she has a good meal with you in the evening, that's the most important thing.

In most cases "dinner/tea" at nursery isn't intended to be the evening meal but more a snack to keep the children going until they eat with family

We had this too, it was annoying with my eldest because then he wouldn't eat dinner with us but be hungry again at 4am, and then also annoying with my dc2 as she would eat a full meal with them, another full dinner with us, plus they fed them lots of milk, and I got told off by the HV that she'd gone up 2 weight percentiles while staying flat for height...

I always assumed it's so that the people who pick up early still feel they're getting their money's worth.

I remember also being flummoxed by this when looking at nurseries but like others we just stick to our own, much later, routine on non-nursery days and he has dinner with us at 6 as usual on nursery days (though doesn't always eat much of it) and that all seems to work fine.

I'm actually always amazed at how many families do have routines where toddlers eat dinner at 4pm - they're always the ones where they then moan that the child is up at 5am and they just don't know why... (Because they're starving hungry by then and you put them to bed in the afternoon!)

The nursery we used for my older DC did the lunch at about 11:30 - 11:45 (which was a proper hot meal), and a light tea at about 4pm.

The lunch was timed so that it would be done with by the time the afternoon session for the pre-schoolers started.

The light tea was a light snacky meal rather than a proper big hot meal because the nursery expected that most children would be given a dinner or supper after their parents took them home. And the nursery closed at 6pm, so they’d not want to be having children still eating at 6pm.

Nursery tea isn’t usually a proper evening meal.

Nurseries have a lot more to get through - 10s of kids to get fed lunch and down for naps so staff can have lunch breaks.
Nursery cooks usually don’t work all day so tea has to be prepped for room staff to dish out and then kitchen cleaned before cook leaves at 3 for example. Then at the end of the day staff have to clean the rooms while watching the kids and handing over to parents.

If they did “standard” meal times staff would be there all day.

At the nursery I ran timings were breakfast 7-8.30, lunch at 12, tea at 3.30.
The reason was that the sessions ran 8-12 1- 4.30 ( with wrap around care either side if these times). This meant that all the children that were in between 12-1 were given lunch - a large number if the children being in all day from 7 till 6.
Most of the morning children stayed for lunch and a lot if the afternoon children came early for it.

Children were picked up from any time from 4 so all had eaten before home x

@THATbasicSNOWFLAKE

In most cases "dinner/tea" at nursery isn't intended to be the evening meal but more a snack to keep the children going until they eat with family

Yes, that's what I thought.

Ours is breakfast between 8 and 9

Snack at 10:30

Lunch at 12:00

Tea at 16:00

I think lunch at nurseries is usually the main meal ie cooked meal and desert, then dinner/ tea is more like a decent snack ie sandwich/ quiche/ eggs.

So I would just treat nursery dinner as ‘large snack’, and still give them a smaller portion of normal evening meal at 6pm as usual or another large snack

Quite normal, they can't be serving dinner when a lot are picked up from 1700 onwards.

Where I work we do
Morning snack (toast and fruit) 10am
Hot cooked lunch with pudding 12 midday
Afternoon snack (fruit and cake) 3.30pm

Parents are expected to have given breakfast.

Yes ours are the same - we just do snack tea on nursery days (sandwich / hummus and pitta / cereal or similar) rather than a proper tea as sometimes he won’t be that hungry and just wants to pick. We do our normal timings on non nursery days and he’s fine with that (though our tea time is earlier at 4.30 anyway)

I work at a nursery - it’s done like this because parents start arriving to collect from about 4.30 so it’s super busy getting the children ready to go, etc! When the children are eating we need all the staff supervising and the interruptions with the bell going and having to pull a child away from the table etc wouldn’t work