How to make that ride home from daycare healthier for your kids

Any parent will tell you that the trip home from daycare can be a fraught time. Both parents and children are tired after their long day apart, and preschool kids are usually starving after a day of playing hard with friends. Parents usually have food ready in the car, but the typical snack that many parents are providing is raising alarms among pediatric experts because they tend to be high in fat, sugar and salt.

A new study published in the journal Children’s Health Care found that kids eat fewer heathy foods and take in 22 percent of their day’s added sugar in the first hour after daycare pickup.

The average age of the child in the study was 4.3 years old and they ate an average of 1,471 calories a day with 20 percent of their daily intake occurring during that same hour.

It’s not hard to figure out how this happens. Parents are tired, kids are ‘hangry,’ and a prepacked package of muffins or a granola bar is easy and convenient. They are also full of sugar.

Unfortunately, healthier snacks require parents to fit more time into an already hectic struggle to get themselves ready for work and the kids ready for school, said pediatrician Kenneth Colmer, MD, at Bass River Pediatric Associates.

“It would mean cutting up some veggies or having those little yogurt cups, so it would mean putting them in a cooler,” he said. “There’s only so much someone can do in the morning.”

Helpful Strategies

That said, there are strategies for parents to more easily plan for healthy snacks. Almost all of them depend on the use of a cooler with an ice pack. Grocery stores now sell precut fruits and veggies that are easy to pack.

“They sell little tubs of hummus and you could throw that in the cooler and the kids could dip carrots and celery in the hummus. That would be a nice idea,” Dr. Colmer said. “Another good choice is nuts. That’s something that could be made on a Sunday – a trail mix. Take cashews, peanuts, almonds, raisins, pumpkin seeds and throw it all together and then put it in snack bags. That would be a really simple thing to get ready for the week.”

Handheld fruit, like an apple or pear, is another great choice. The fewer things that come from a package the better, Dr. Colmer said.

“Your body needs healthy food and (food companies) process it so much, it just takes all of the nutrition out of it,” he said.

He also called out sugary drinks, like soda, Gatorade and even fruit juice, as bad choices for kids. The only beverages children should drink are milk and water, he said.

He did acknowledge that getting kids to eat healthier can be more of a challenge for some parents than others.

“It’s funny,” he said, “Some kids will eat great. They’ll eat any fruit or vegetable you give them. And then there’s other kids that won’t go near it, and it’s hard to figure out why that is. But most kids as they get older tend to come around and eat more fruits and vegetables. It’s a pretty common story.”

Eating Better at Mealtime

Dr. Colmer regularly offers parents advice on how to get their children to eat better at all meals. His tips include:

• Don’t make mealtime a battle because kids will just dig their heels in and become more stubborn. Plus, family dinner time should be a pleasant experience, not a dreaded one.
• If you offer three things, like chicken, rice and broccoli, it’s okay if they only eat one of the three, since they are all healthy foods.
• Try the one bite rule. Tell the child they only have to take one bite of a food. Then if they don’t like it, they don’t have to eat it. But they might be surprised by what they do like.
• If they don’t like a food after taking one bite, don’t give up. Simply wait a few months and try again. The American Academy of Pediatrics has found that kids may have to try a food 15 to 20 times to like it.
• Don’t offer a second meal choice. If you do, they will get used to getting whatever they want and they will become pickier. It also makes more work for parents if they have to make multiple dishes at dinner.

“When they go to bed, they might be a little hungry but they’ll be fine,” Dr. Colmer said. And then when they wake up in the morning, maybe they’ll be a little hungrier and they’ll eat breakfast. If they miss a meal, they’ll be okay. There are some kids that don’t have an appetite for three meals a day. They only like two meals and that’s all they need.”

Depending on their age, kids need between 1,000 and 2,000 calories a day, Dr. Colmer said. Unfortunately, children today are not immune from the obesity epidemic in the United States. From 2017 to 2020, about 19.7 percent of children and adolescents between the ages of two and 19, were obese according to the CDC. That’s approximately 14.7 million kids. In the 1970s, only 5 percent of kids in the same age group were obese.

Tips From a Registered Dietitian

Dr. Colmer shared that at the monthly Cape Cod Healthcare physicians meeting in June, he heard a talk by registered dietitian Sue Bourque, an educator on nutrition and food safety from the Barnstable County Cooperative Extension, who spoke on the topic of nutrition and obesity. He said he was impressed by the Extension’s nutrition programs, which feature Bourque and her colleagues going into schools and teaching kids about healthy eating. Some schools have gardens and the kids plant the seeds, harvest the vegetables and then are shown how to make healthy snacks with their harvest.

Studies show that children who garden are more likely to eat more produce and try a larger variety of vegetables, according to the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.

But Bourque also had great advice for parents, according to Dr. Colmer.

“She emphasized that the most important thing to her was that it tasted good,” he said. “She said no matter how healthy it is, if it doesn’t taste good, kids are not going to eat it.”