Feeding Snacks to Kids

It's not as straightforward as it seems.

Kids are famously hard to feed. Many have strong food preferences and aversions, and they’re often hard to pull away from their play to come and eat. Things have gotten trickier in recent years, though, because these days feeding kids is a straight-up controversial issue. Competing perspectives have emerged (and they go way beyond carnivore vs. vegetarian), parents often have very strong commitments to their feeding philosophy, and if Aunties choose wrongly we may inadvertently violate parents’ values.

Today I’ll summarize the two big competing points of view on feeding children that hold sway these days. Then, after the paywall, I’ll offer guidance on how to maximize kids’ chance of actually eating something nourishing while also having parents’ backs when it comes to feeding their kids. Nutrition isn’t my area of expertise, to be clear, but I’ve read, thought, and unlearned a lot about feeding kids (and myself!) in recent years, and I’d like to share some insights I’ve found helpful.

I’m. just noticing right now that the poster implies we need ice cream cones…. Yay!

Now, when I was a kid growing up in the U.S., experts and parents mostly agreed on what people should and shouldn’t eat. I was taught in school in the 80s that sugar was bad for you, and the “four food groups” – dairy, meat, produce, and grains – were good. In 1992, the U.S. Department of Agriculture rolled out its new “food pyramid”: now we were supposed to eat more grains and produce than dairy and meat, and fat explicitly joined sugar in the “bad” category.

The four food groups and the food pyramid shared a basic perspective – the dominant view to this day – that some foods are healthy and we should eat a lot of them, and other foods are unhealthy and we should minimize them or avoid them altogether. While some foods remain consistently in the “healthy” category (e.g., vegetables) and others stay firmly in the “unhealthy” category (e.g., candy), for many foods it depends who you ask and what decade you’re in (e.g., grains and carbs). But no matter which foods were or are in which category, the general idea that some foods are good and some foods are bad remains. Let’s call this the “traditional” approach to nutrition.

In recent years, some experts and parents have begun challenging the traditional approach, favoring instead what I’ll call the “anti-diet” approach. Much of what I know about this I’ve learned from Virginia Sole-Smith’s excellent newsletter, Burnt Toast, where she writes about raising kids to reject diet culture and anti-fat bias. Some of the big ideas that have been helpful to me include:

• All bodies are good bodies.

• People can be healthy at any size.

• “Fat” can and should be a neutral word, not negative or an insult.

• Diets almost always fail, and we often gain back more weight than we lost (it’s me, hi 👋).

• Fat people experience widespread bias, prejudice, and discrimination, including in medical settings, and we should be way more concerned about the harms of fatphobia than about policing other people’s body size.

• We need to raise kids to love their bodies and protect them from toxic diet culture that often leads to eating disorders.

If these perspectives appeal to you, I totally recommend subscribing to Sole-Smith’s newsletter – and if they don’t, I also totally recommend subscribing to her newsletter. She also has a New York Times bestselling book about raising kids in the age of diet culture.

An anti-diet approach to kids’ snacktime means not particularly limiting sugar or fats, not describing foods as “good” or “bad,” “healthy” or “unhealthy,” and certainly not communicating judgment about our own or other people’s bodies. Here’s a good primer on this approach to feeding kids.

Okay, so that’s the basic terrain: there’s the traditional approach that we’re probably all familiar with, and the anti-diet approach that many parents (and non-parents!) have embraced in recent years. Where is an Auntie to land?

In my view, it’s not our call. We need to find out what the parents or primary caregivers want their kids to eat and not eat, and honor that. Period.

For me this is honestly a relief, because I think the traditional approach vs. anti-diet approach is a super hard judgment call. I’m so glad I’m not the one who has to decide. On the one hand, I’ve spent the past few years (ever since I started reading Burnt Toast) working hard to unlearn my own painful and harmful beliefs that I need to always be on a diet and that my body is bad. After spending most of my life on a diet, I’m getting better at not treating carbs as the enemy. I know from personal experience how easy it is for young people (especially young girls) to start hating their bodies at an early age and carry on dieting and feeling inadequate for decades – or for the rest of their lives. I’m convinced by the preponderance of research-based evidence that much of what we think we know about bodies, food, diets, and health is wrong.

On the other hand, I still often want kids to eat basically healthy foods. I haven’t totally divested from the healthy/unhealthy categories myself. I get headaches when I eat very much sugar, so I project that onto kids in the form of not wanting them to have too much sugar. I feel better when I eat protein at every meal, so I find myself wanting kids to also eat protein frequently. I believe in the healthy power of fruits and vegetables.

I don’t feel like I have it all figured out. I’m just out here trying to do my best, you know?

Alright, enough philosophizing. Let’s get into the practicalities of feeding a child a snack, eh? Here’s what I’ve learned over many years of doing snacktime.

If you know you’ll be taking care of kids, talk to their primary caregivers about what not to feed them. Find out about the parents’ philosophy on sugar in particular and on restricting certain foods in general, but also be sure you know if the kids are vegetarians or vegans, if they have intolerances to foods like dairy or gluten, and if they have any food allergies. If the kids are picky eaters – which many, many kids are – the parents may also have some guidance on what their kids will eat. Do heed their advice about specific brands: picky eater kids are not messing around.

Kids need a snack immediately after school or daycare or a big activity, and roughly every two hours. Be proactive about feeding kids a snack as soon as you pick them up or they walk in the door. Aim to feed them somewhat frequently. Don’t forget hydration. If a kid is getting grumpy, weepy, or unusually wild, that’s often a signal that they need to eat.

Here are some kid-friendly foods that tend to be cool with parents, regardless of their feeding philosophy (this is assuming that you’ve had the “what not to feed my kid” conversation). I usually keep a lot of the following on hand (for kids, but also because I like to eat them, too).

• Fruit. Most of the kids in my life will eat apple slices or fresh or frozen berries. Lots of other fruits are also popular, including bananas, oranges, kiwis, and avocados – although this will vary with the kid and with the fruits available in your region.

• Cheese. The most kid-friendly cheeses are mild cheddar, string cheese, and those little pucks of edam that come wrapped in red wax. A quesadilla warmed up in the microwave will also do for many kids.

• Peanut butter on rice cakes or crackers. If their parents are open to a little sugar I’ll often offer to put honey on, too. Peanut butter + honey = delicious. Beware of kids who won’t eat chunky peanut butter or only want the disgraceful kind with lots of palm oil in it (to be clear, that’s the kind I want).

• Crunchy snacks. Nuts, granola, cereal, popcorn, chips, goldfish crackers, dried seaweed. A lot of kids will eat these when they won’t eat anything else. We all love salty crunchy!

• Kid-friendly meal-like foods including eggs (scrambled or hard-boiled, with or without the yolks removed), sausage, chicken nuggets, boxed mac n’ cheese.

• Popsicles. I try to get away with hoarding the premium ones with real chunks of strawberry for myself, and giving the off-brand otter pops to the kids, but some of the little punks I know are on to me at this point. 😒

“Surely you don’t want a popsicle made with chunks of actual fruit when you could have a dayglo plastic sleeve of frozen juice-like product?”

Getting kids to actually put food into their mouths can be an uphill climb. Here are some strategies that often work for me:

• It helps to offer food the kid actually wants. Just like adults, their moods change and they might want different foods at different times. Try offering different things until they go for something.

• For kids who are too busy playing, it can help to unwrap the food, put a bite in front of their mouth, and say, “here, eat this.”

• I wrote a whole post about getting kids to eat their dinner, featuring many clever and devious tricks, subterfuges, and manipulations. This post is paywalled, so it’s a good thing you’re a paid subscriber, you wonderful Auntie you!

• Although kids aren’t always great at listening to their bodies’ signals, sometimes they’re legitimately not hungry – maybe they just had a snack before they got to your place. If you’ve tried several strategies, just wait a while and try again.

KINSHIP SNACKS: How To Get Kids to Eat Their Dinner

If you’re interested in cooking or baking snacks with or for kids, here are two great places to start. Both are moms, and both have lots of great advice for preparing and serving food to kids of all ages.

• Lily Payen’s Feeding Tiny Bellies

• Amy Palanjian’s Yummy Toddler Food

It’s handy but not necessary to have kid-friendly dishware. I tend to avoid buying plastic items if I can help it, but I do have some plastic cups, bowls, and plates (including plates with those little partitions for kids who don’t want their foods to touch). FYI, kids’ dishes are available in great abundance at any Goodwill and probably lots of other thrift and secondhand locations all over the world. There’s no need for you to have to take responsibility for new plastic.

The future’s in plastics.

Teenagers can usually feed themselves, but remind them to eat and offer them options anyway. Depending on their age and personality, teens may or may not think to get food for themselves. They usually know how to fix their own snacks, but they may need to be reminded or they may hope you’ll hook them up – which, let’s face it, you probably will because you’re an Auntie and you dote on them and you probably don’t get to see them as often as you’d like. (Alternatively, they may inhale all the food in your home and then ask if you have any more).

Protect kids against diet culture. Look, regardless of what snacks we offer, Aunties can and should protect kids from learning fatphobia and the risk of eating disorders. We can support kids to love their bodies by never describing foods as fattening or unhealthy, never talking smack about our own or anyone else’s body, and treating body fat as neutral. Kids in my life comment with some regularity on my soft body, my soft belly, and so on. I genuinely no longer mind. I say, “yep, I’m kind of fat!” Or, “aren’t soft bodies nice?”

Part of having parents’ backs – a primary Auntie role and goal! – is to uphold the parents’ values around feeding their kids, and return them to their primary caregivers fed and hopefully in a good mood. (The one really does tend to lead to the other). Feeding snacks to kids is how we show love to those kids, and the way we feed snacks to kids is how we show love to their parents.

Three Recommended Reads

One. Actual Things My Parents Said While Watching My Son’s Swimming Lesson

I enjoy Bess Kalb’s newsletter, The Grudge Report, so much. A lot of her humorous posts about parenting are paywalled, but not this one!

INT. INDOOR POOL VIEWING AREA - MY SON AND FIVE OTHER KIDS ARE DOING A SWIMMING LESSON IN A LANE ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE GIANT PLEXIGLASS WINDOW.

DAD: He’s goin’ in! Here he goes!

MOM: He is so brave. He is so scared but he is being so strong.

ME: He’s not scared he actually loves sw-

DAD: He has your little brother’s courage. He is so much like Will.

MOM: He’s exactly like Will.

DAD: It’s Will all over again. The brilliance, too.

MOM: Will’s teachers would say all the same things when he was in kindergarten. “Off the charts genius.”

ME: I’m not sure anyone’s ever actually said tha-

DAD: They’re thinking it.

Two. Escaping the Guilt-Burnout Spiral.

Hailey Huget is a philosopher and union organizer who recently started a newsletter. I am in love with what she’s written so far, and I can’t wait to read more from her. The post I’m sharing here starts with her in active labor in December 2023 and feeling so guilty about setting aside her fears and worries about the pregnant people and new babies in Gaza long enough to give birth to her own child. What follows is a timely, necessary reflection on how coming to activism from a place of guilt leads us inevitably to burnout.

For those workers who are already involved, and whose involvement skews toward hyperactive, guilt-ridden engagement, I typically ask them if they think our fight stops when they win an election or a contract. Eventually they will say no — that the boss will always fight back, and so we have to remain vigilant. Then I’ll ask if they think the gains we make in this workplace will hold if no other workplaces in the sector are organized. Again, they’ll say no — coming to the conclusion that, in order to truly win a better deal for the working class, we need to be willing to organize every workplace we find ourselves in. Then I ask them if the way they are showing up right now is a way that they can imagine themselves showing up in the next decade, in 20 years, and for the rest of their lives, in every place they work. If they say no, maybe it’s a sign that they need to pull back, or to reexamine their motivations for engaging in the first place and see if they can find a more sustainable foundation for their engagement.

And then she offers a more sustainable foundation for engagement. This one is a must-read.

Three. Why You Should be Reading Motherhood Memoirs.

Kevin McGuire writes a terrific newsletter for dads called The New Fatherhood. He has an extensive archive full of wisdom on how dads can parent well and support one another honestly and vulnerably in an age when expectations around fatherhood are changing rapidly. I like this newsletter because I think Aunties can learn a lot from dads about being mom-adjacent and supporting moms.

To wit: recently McGuire wrote a great post about why dads should be reading motherhood memoirs. I think Aunties should too! Reading motherhood memoirs is one of the most powerful ways we can better understand, empathize with, and learn to support parents in general and moms in particular. I’m with McGuire that Rachel Cusk’s short memoir of the first year of motherhood, A Life’s Work, is a great place to start.

She wrote about the disorientation of the early days, the unavoidable identity crisis, the crushing weight of responsibility—everything outside the Overton window of motherhood as it stood at the turn of the century…. The backlash was so severe she was still telling mums “sorry-not-sorry” seven years later: “I didn't particularly want anyone to read it. It had been important for me to make a record, that was all, of emotional and physical states I was unlikely to experience again.”

Covering the pregnancy and early, blurry months, she touches on the absurdity of bottle feeding (“Covertly, I go to a shop and buy bottles, sterilising tablets, tins of powdered formula milk. At home I lay them out like someone preparing to assemble a bomb.”) and the shock in seeing the world of books, her true centre of gravity, shifted forever (”Like someone visiting old haunts after an absence, I read books that I have read before, books I have loved, and when I do I find them changed: they give the impression of having all along contained everything I had gone away to learn.")

And Now, the Cute Kid Video of the Week

This kid is being pretty saucy in terms of tone and body-language (and yes, it’s super cute), but what I love is that they actually use their words (not shouting or violence) to communicate their emotional state and needs. Being real, most adults don’t know how to do what this kid (who looks about 5 or 6) does in this short video clip. I didn’t really learn how to do it until my late 30s, when I got married. I learned to say to my partner, “I feel grumpy and I need some space.” It is amazing to me that this kid knows how to communicate so skillfully already. What a wise child!

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