From the article: How to Pack Healthy School Lunches
It can often feel like a thankless, and fruitless, job: Packing your child's school lunch. It has to be healthy, tasty, and stay fresh from early morning until noon. How do you do it? What do you put in your child's lunch to make sure she eats a nutritious meal (without throwing away all the healthy stuff)? Share Your Ideas
Make your children themselves to choose
- An effective way to overcome unopened lunch box is to give an ear to your kid's opinion regarding the selection of food items the previous night when they are in relaxed mood. You can convince or motivate them regarding healthy eating without pressure. Make them understand instead of giving instructions.
- —Guest Umamaheswari P
Love the Bento
- I love, love, love Japanese bento boxes. But, I don't want to buy all of the containers, so I found a great little lunchbox online that has individual compartments and just one lid, and I try to fill each compartment with fruits and veggies. Sometimes, I try to make the lunches holiday themed or other fun things like bento pros do, but other times, I am just lucky to get a lunch made for the kids at all. One of the kids' favs for their bentoish boxes are home made, whole grain muffins of all flavors. I love to experiment with different recipes and sub applesauce for oil and reduce the sugar to make a super healthy, nutrition packed muffin. Then, one days' breakfast is the next days' school lunch.
- —CJmom
Granola as Dessert
- My son loves those chewy granola bars. Instead of sticking cookies into his lunchbox, I break up a low-fat chewy granola bar into small squares for a dessert. Not a crumb comes home from school!
- —Guest MomOfBoys
Variety is Key
- I think that if you send the same thing over and over, kids get bored. I like to send some tried and true things but shake it up with something different once in a while, too. I put Miso soup in a thermos or send vegetarian sushi, for example. He loves the change. Once in a while I like to send something sweet, too, but not every day. I get a nice big thank you on those days and he doesn't take it for granted.
- —Guest Stephanie
Breakfast for Lunch
- Occassionally, I'll send in a breakfast for lunch. Some favorites are cereal, multigrain waffles (my kiddos love them cold), hard boiled eggs, cottage cheese with apple butter, or fruit and cream cheese sandwiches. Those are always hits!
- —Guest JBmomma
Leftovers for Lunch
- My kids are not big sandwich eaters, so they often eat dinner leftovers for lunch. This saves time on packing too--just put a few portions into packable containers while cleaning up after dinner. (My kids also don't care whether the food is hot at lunchtime.)
- —Guest elena
