NUTRITION
Our Children | Fall 2021
Lunch Box Lessons Pack in the life-skills
By Karen Kerr, Registered Holistic Nutritional Consultant Photography by Bruce Murray/VisionFire
H
appy Back to School to all of you tired and frazzled parents. Summer is a glorious time of year, but it can often be hectic with planning activities, extra laundry and kids being off their normal schedules. I look forward to the beginning of a new school year like it’s my favourite holiday. But one area I dreaded was the “Packing of the Lunch”. Sure, I start the year off with Instagram worthy planned out lunches, but even with my passion for nutrition I can get the urge to throw in the towel by mid-October and hand over the lunch money to my middle school aged daughter with the message “don’t spend it all on candy, or just don’t tell me.” I couldn’t imagine trying to plan lunch boxes for more than my one child. Whether you have one hungry student or half a dozen something that I have learned in my nutrition business
and in conversations with parents is that we tend to over pack the lunch box than not enough. In lieu of giving you a long grocery list and a multitude of recipes that you can easily find on Pinterest, I’d like to share my philosophy. Boiled down it’s this. The quicker they can fend for themselves the better! It’s the teach them to fish principle. It all starts by helping nurture your child’s healthy relationship with food in the early years. As a parent it’s your job to make healthy choices their job as they go through the many development stages of growing up and becoming independent. They will not have you for their personal chef forever! I think as parents we focus too much on the micro and not enough on the macro. Meaning we stress when Johnny only eats meat and hates vegetable or Sally won’t eat anything that
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