A Snack System that Works

What mom couldn’t use a snack system that works?  One of the most common phrases uttered at my house is, “I’m hungry!”  I think my kids would eat 24 hours a day if it was possible!  But snacks are something that can really add up in the grocery budget!  And honestly my kids don’t really NEED a snack 20 minutes after lunch!  So this summer I decided we needed to figure out a better system before we all lost our minds!

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Determine Your Snack Boundaries

This first step may be the most important one!  You need to decide what you want your snack boundaries to be.  I don’t believe in one perfect answer for this question.  I will very much depend on the age and stage of your child.  Also, how much of the day is your child home to have snacks?  My kids are allowed more snacks during the summer when they are home all day versus the school year when snacks are mostly saved for after school hours. 

I am not here to tell anyone what their boundaries should be!  But if you want to put some boundaries around snacking, you have to be able to clearly decide what those should be.  Is snacking limited to certain times of the day?  Is there a certain number of snacks your child is allowed?  Are there any off limits snacks?  Determine your boundaries and then clearly communicate them to your children.

 Give Out Snack Tickets

After you have clearly communicated your snack boundaries to your children you can then hand out snack tickets!  In the summer I allowed my kids to have three snacks throughout the day.  But I found that with multiple children it was really hard to keep track of how many snacks each child had consumed!  I knew we needed something to help us keep track!  Enter our snack tickets!

I printed three tickets for each child.  We hole punched the end and put them on their lanyards (are my kids the only ones really into lanyards?).  When they wanted a snack they would come to me and turn in a snack ticket.  Of course, I still have the option to say No if it is right before a meal, but in general, barring other issues, I am willing to let them trial and error and figure out how to distribute those throughout the day.  At first, one of my kids flew through their tickets and then regretted that decision in the afternoon!  These are good life lessons though!  Using the tickets I really did see them become more mindful about what they ate, which I consider a win!

Consider Unlimited Fruits and Veggies in you Snack System

Just in case you are worried that my kids were truly hungry and I didn’t feed them, we did make a rule that they were allowed to have unlimited fruits and vegetables.  I know that kids go through growth spurts and sometimes and truly more hungry then seems possible!  So to give me confidence that I wasn’t starving my kids, I made a rule that fruits and vegetables were always available.  I know this may not be for everyone, but I figured fruits and vegetables are about the healthiest foods you can eat.  If they are really hungry and they choose to eat these food they aren’t hurting anything.  And honestly making this rule, I really saw an increase in the amount of fruits and vegetables eaten.  

If you are interested in trying this snack system, I have provided some generic snack coupons for you!  You can write your kids name on them or even use the black and white versions and let your kids color them before laminating them.  Happy snacking!

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