Daycare Lunchbox: A Basic Guide

“It takes me two hours to get ready in the morning!” A mum once told me, adding that it was mostly because she had to prepare two lunchboxes to send with her primary-school-aged daughter and her preschool-aged boy. One in three Australian mothers are responsible for fixing lunchboxes every day, and two thirds of them have negative emotions towards it! A kidspot.com.au website’s survey run two years ago, found out mothers feel rushed, lacking in imagination, bored and  frustrated by the task. Add to that, pressure from some schools and childcare centres’s culture of shaming families for sending the wrong  snacks in their children’s lunchboxes, and “blog mumma stars” bombarding posts about how easy it is to do better and how to produce “Instagramable” lunchboxes, and you have a legion of resented mothers who are just trying their best to nourish their children.

If you’re one of those mums, you may go…

Can anybody tell me what is that that makes a lunchbox healthy, pleeeeaaaase?

Alright, let’s start with this:

About half of a child’s daily dietary needs will be taken while at daycare. That means the lunchbox contents should be of, at least, lunch and two snacks (for morning and afternoon). If your child spends more than 8 hours a day in childcare, one more snack should be added to the lot. And, honestly, nothing else. A toddler is easily overwhelmed by more than two choices, so sending many choices of snacks can be a challenge for your little one, and also for the teachers trying to guide his/her decisions…

Your lunchbox menu plan for one day should look something like this:

Lunchbox Menu Plan (Eat Play Learn Nutrition), picture by Fern Rodrigues

The Australian Dietary Guidelines (ADG) give specific recommendations of number of serves of each food group (meats/plant-based alternatives, dairy/plant-based alternatives, vegetables, fruit, grains), a person should eat in a day, depending on sex and age. It is a quite complex and extensive piece of information to take in, and can be confusing even to nutrition professionals. But let me try to summarise it, focusing on recommendations for children:

Food groups serves examples for a child’s daily lunchbox, chart by Fern Rodrigues

Each item in the boxes above is an example of one serve of food from that group, and the numbers on the top mean the amount from each group to be sent in the lunchbox in a day.

For example, a lunchbox that contains

1 banana (medium size) – usually eaten at morning tea

½ cup cooked pasta + ¼ cup Bolognese sauce – for lunch

½ cup carrot sticks + ½ cup cherry tomatoes – for lunch or afternoon tea

2 slices of Tasty cheese (maybe cut into smaller squares) + 5 water crackers – for afternoon tea

is a well balanced lunchbox, nutritionally speaking, as well as filled with very common foods in lunchboxes and popular with its little carriers!

See? Nothing fancy. Lunch is perhaps leftovers from last night’s dinner and all other items are common foods that would probably be in  the pantry to feed the rest of the household. No need for “children snacks”! You know, those blisters with creamy cheese and 2 crackers, or mini cereal bars or pureed fruit pouches that are marketed as children’s foods which are not always healthy options, are expensive and create a lot of packaging waste, not every time properly disposed of.

A sceptic may go…

Ah, that’s gonna cost!

Love in a Lunchbox is a program devised by a primary school of Hobart, Tasmania, that shares healthy tips with the families, and also calculates the cost of a nutritious lunchbox compared to one filled with pre-packaged food. In a workshop run in 2018, they showed an  example of a lunchbox with a zucchini slice, grapes, crackers with  hummus and capsicum strips that cost around $2.73. Another one full of pre-packaged “children’s snacks” like chips, Nutella chocolate, flavoured yoghurt, jelly and a piece of fruit cost $8.503.

Convenient vs. Home packaged food cost comparison, chart by Fern Rodrigues

The above diagram shows a rough calculation comparing the cost of small packets of food, meant for snack, – largely targeting lunchbox-making consumers – and normal sized packets, meant for the household that can be also used for lunchboxes. If one serve is sent every day, five days a week, you could save around $80 on plain full cream milk and almost $150 on cheese and crackers by the end of a year(6). And this is per each child-lunchbox!

The basic message here is that there is no need for children’s specific foods. There is a wealth of food options children appreciate as much as us adults. So, nourishing doesn’t have to be complex nor expensive.

Yeah, right! You make it all sound so easy…

If you need a little help to get out of the food industry marketing trap and yet be sure you send a nutritionally balanced lunchbox that will give your bundle-of-joy-and-trouble all nutrients needed for an active and happy day at school or daycare, look for information on sites like Eat 4 Health and Healthy Kids. They are both “.gov” type of source which means they are reliable sources.  Or seek advice of a nutrition professional like a nutritionist or a dietitian with qualifications such as a bachelor degree and above. That way, you will be getting information from reliable sources, with scientifically based knowledge and advice. To be fair, there are “.com”  type of websites that lend high quality information as well. On those, look for the author/writer’s credentials (same as for nutritionists and  dietitians mentioned above).

How about talking to a qualified nutritionist with experience in childcare?

Fern has a side gig as an early childhood educator and cook, and has experience in time saving, home kitchen proof cooking, and can give tips and suggestions that she knows work.

So, don’t be shy if you need a hand with your child’s lunchbox, and book a free 20 minutes Discovery Chat with her.