To ask for healthy after school snack ideas (portable)

[MoonStar07]

So I'm fed up of seeing kids with haribos, quavers or curly dried up fruit sugar things...what's a healthy kids portable snack? I've been taking little pots of fruit chopped up but I need some protein ideas? Cubes of (God forbid) cheese?! With the fruit? And what about a low GI carb snack to go with fruit and cheese? Thanks

[SatsukiKusakabe]

Agree, in the same boat flumpty & mummyatlast

Equally my kids have a substantial snack after school every day and never leave their dinner. They are slender and active.

[MrsHathaway]

I use St Delia's banana loaf recipe and dump the batter in muffin cases.

[MoonStar07]

I love food threads! Thanks for the ideas. Anyone got a banana muffin recipe?

[Laquila]

Well, Tantrums...in the nicest possible way, bully for you! My point is that just because you've never felt the need to boil an egg for your school-age child etc, it's by unreasonable that someone else has! 😄 There's all sorts of variables here - age of child, dietary requirements, general health, quality of sleep, length of walk, fitness, length of time between mealtimes, activity levels etc. And I don't think the OP has said that her children actually need to eat all the way home, do they?! Flumpty makes some very interesting points about the perceived moral value of snacking. (Not a sentence I ever thought I'd write.)

[MrsHathaway]

Depends what you mean by hungry tbh. Sometimes they have an empty tummy but you want it empty again in an hour and a half so they'll eat a proper tea.

[YelloDraw]

Chunk of cucumber

Completely pointless as a snack if they are hungry!

[Secretmetalfan]

Banana, Apple, sandwich, cheese, cereal bar, rice cakes. You are Collecting children from school not organising the nutritional requirements of an Olympic athlete. Who the fuck has time to organise some of these snacks, I would suggest stepping away from the nutrition books and getting a hobby/volunteer

[Artandco]

Mine get fruit or cheese. But we don't get home from school until 6.30pm and they eat dinner 7-7.30. So they would have to wait 12-7 or later

[EarSlaps]

Navy, those chocolate balls do sound a bit healthy/middle class, but it balances out the times I take fondant fancies or some biscuits. I doubt OP would be interested in the normal sort of snacks I provide .

Ds2 is very underweight and very fussy so anything that gets protein or fat into him is a winner.

[FlumptyDumpty]

I don't get it, either amummyatlast, which is why I'm keen to hear other points of view. As a prolific snacker with a BMI of 22, who gets ravenous between meals and grumpy and unable to think straight when hungry, I see snacks as a good thing. If I am unable to eat a snack when it comes to mealtime I eat a larger meal to compensate ( and probably eat more because I am just SO hungry my brain seems to think I need to stock up in case of famine). So not snacking would not, in my case, lead to a reduction in calories.

I guess we're all different and you should just eat in the way that suits you personally. It's just interesting to me how some people seem to think that other people should follow their own eating habits, and that a no-snacking regime is optimal, and I would like to understand their reasoning.

[OwlinaTree]

navy there's no chocolate in those balls!

[Amummyatlast]

I never get the anti-snack angst on mn. I snack frequently, and can be a real grump if I don't. I also eat my meals and have been a size 6-8 for most of my adult life.

[madcapcat]

I think there's a difference between a ten minute car journey and a longer walk - dn is unusual among her peers in that she walks to and from school which when she's coming to us is a good 45 minute walk. On other days she goes straight to activities like gymnastics without time for more than a snack. We don't take something every day, but we usually do (and she loves sugar snap peas, strips of red pepper, cherry tomatoes etc) and when she's going on to an activity I make sure her packed lunch that day contains a number of individual snack items which will keep her going until she gets home after 8pm. It's a very long day otherwise.

[honeylulu]

If mine have an afternoon snack they just pick at their dinner. I would rather they ate meals than snacks.

[SatsukiKusakabe]

Oh it's probably the rise of obesity or something like that...

[FlumptyDumpty]

Finding this thread interesting, especially the camp who seem horrified at children seemingly not being able to wait until they get home. It seems a sort of moral outrage, which I find interesting.

I don't see anything morally inferior about having a snack at the gate, rather than home, personally, though I'm aware that in the past eating in the street was considered common(!)

So those who are uncomfortable with children not waiting to eat until they get home: what's that about? Genuine question, I'm just interested in finding out more about your point of view as somebody whose blood sugar fluctuations often lead to eating on the hoof.

[SatsukiKusakabe]

I only bring the jam sandwiches etc for after an activity, and now he can manage fine after school. Last year was different.

There are adults that need to eat more often and are affected by blood sugar (not necessarily as part of a condition) more than others - surely it's not hard to see that children may be different too? And really an individual child needing something extra at a particular time of day is nothing to do with whether those same parents give them fizzy drinks or not. There's no correlation there.

I see a lot of kids having tantrums on the way home from school that could have been avoided with a well-timed apple, but each to their own.

[treggle]

I must say I assumed the OP meant snacks for between school and activities, of you go on to swimming after school or something. If it's just for the walk home I never bother. Once I brought a frozen ice pop when it was hot, it was the stuff of LEGENDS

[TantrumsAndBalloons]

i just find unbelievable that you can need emergency after school food to stabilise blood sugar and this cannot wait until getting out of the car at home. Not even walking home.

People can't see the irony here?

Mn is full of people who won't let a 10 year old have a taste of fizzy drink or chocolate or crisps but are happy with a snack every single day at 3.15 because their child can't manage a short walk or car journey without an issue with their blood sugar.

Bizarre

[treggle]

I only take snacks if we are going on somewhere

[BiddyPop]

Oh, and snacks when we get home are things like pieces of cheese (generally real cheese rather than cheesetrings type - although we have gone through phases of those too), cherry tomatoes, carrot sticks, salami, parma ham, cooked chicken (DD likes to mix that with mayonnaise and curry powder!). I try to avoid crisps and sweets for that time of day, although I do allow them the odd day and they do make it into lunch boxes some days too.

All things in moderation....

[BiddyPop]

As emergency extra bits in DD's schoolbag (no nuts policy in school - there are a number of DCs with allergies), she keeps:

A bag of popcorn (I get the 15g bags)
A bag of mini breadsticks (Tesco do a multipack of snack sized ones)
A box of raisins (matchbox sized)
A Nature Valley bar (currently a choc chip one, we also do oats and honey, or maple syrup versions)

The way I look at it is that she will only accept her hot food flask for lunch food. She does eat fruit but not at school. She does eat breakfast, but sometimes not enough or actually gets quite hungry at school or afterschool, and while afterschool give a snack, it is not usually substantial.

So she keeps a few bits that won't go off in her bag, and we check that every few days and restock as needed. Since going back, she's actually been eating quite a lot, but last term, she'd maybe eat the popcorn once a week or the cereal bar once a fortnight.

And the days that she hasn't eaten enough, she comes out in foul form and growls at everything. So I also keep single finger twixes in the car and some plain chocolate to give her a finger or a square to get her bloodsugar back up.

[Sirzy]

I wonder how many of the children ask for a snack/are hungry simply because they know food will be given though?

[TantrumsAndBalloons]

It's not depriving your child to ask them to walk home from school without eating all the way

Come on. This place is full of people who rear up in horror at sausage and mash but yet have children unable to walk home without eating

Are you currently living at the top of Everest?