After school junks snacks from other parents

[MrMen]

Our 4-year old's school is right next to a park so more often than not, she and her friends go to play after school, accompanied by an entourage of parents.

We are always greeted with an 'Im hungry' after school so go prepared with a selection of healthy snacks. Most of the other mums do the same but what they bring is typically far from healthy and in substantial volumes. More often than not, we find our daughter tearing around the park with a bag of crisps and or chocolate bars and bags of Haribo which has been kindly donated by another mum.

Looking at this carefully this week, on top of the healthy stuff we give her, she gets at least a bag of crisps and and chocolate every day from another mum.

While we are not complete health freaks, we do what we can to make sure our kids eat well and they are comfortable on fruit / healthy drinks. Crisps, chocolate and fizzy drinks are saved as treats.

The after school intake of junk is getting out of hand and it almost seems impossible to police. The simple option is to prohibit a trip to the park but on occasions, our daughter has sourced a bag of crisps before even leaving school!

Looking for some advice / options really, anyone else have this problem and any suggestions on solutions?!!

MrMen, we have some similar issues at the school gate, so to speak. I've found it best to talk directly to the parents. In our case i explain that DS doesn't eat his dinner if he eats too many snacks at school ... takes a while to get around to all the parents, but it slowly improves.

One of the parents who usually has a lot of sweet snacks (and very kindly shares with many kids) has just had their son 'diagnosed' with tooth decay and has been told he can't have any more sweets, etc other than special occasions. Snacks have been much healthier since. Perhaps there is an excuse in there somewhere that you could use!

If you don't want the crisps/chocolate tell your daughter to say "no thank you very much " to the parent and you say something like " thanks but we've brought our own snacks today. Been kind of you to feed all the park though ."

My children at that age didn't take from other parents without checking with me (though one has food allergie/intolerances)

Could you not take extra of what you'd like your daughter to eat and get her to pass it round ?

You might have to disguise the healthiness of it for a while but if she is the hostess it might take her mind off the other goodies?

Especially if she made them with you the night before!

I agree with pancakeflipper my DC were much older than 4 before they would have eaten anything without checking with me first. They used to save all the sweets given out at hometime, for birthdays etc for after tea and would always have asked if they could have sweets offered by other children/parents.

That said, I would always ask another parent before offering anything to their child....

It's not impossible to police. You need to teach your child to not accept anything to eat from anyone else without checking with you first, mine all do.

I also, would never, ever have allowed any "tearing around" with any kind of food.

Eating was only to be done sitting firmly on bottoms because of the choking risk. If they have to sit still to eat, they won't want quite so much of what's being offered

Another one here. I ask parents first and then My Ds needs to ask before he eats them

I have this too, we are also right next to a park and nobody goes home straight away. People turn up with significant amounts of food.

I just said no right from the start. Our school doesn't have lunch till 1.30 so at the beginning when my dc said they were hungry, like the others, I would say 'well you shouldn't be, you only had lunch two hours ago'

Now they are used to it and so are the other parents. In the summer I take frozen water in a one of those pop top bottles and about once every couple of months the group arranges a 'picnic' in the park and we all bring things to share.

The other part of it was that I wanted them to play in the park, not crowd around the child with the bag of donuts then two minutes later crowd around another child with a giant bag of crisps.