School Lunches: Healthy Alternatives For Your Kids

Your kids’ school lunches don’t need to be boring sandwiches and applesauce. Here are some tips to help make school lunches more healthy and fun!

Accept Your Child’s Preferences

School lunches are pretty important to kids, and it’s also essential to know what kinds of eaters your kids are. My two boys are grazers, eating small amounts of food throughout the day. They prefer variety, and having different kinds of snack options work better for our family.

I also like to provide foods that I know they like. For example, they don’t like dried banana chips, but they’ll eat any other kind of dried fruit – I know that dried mango is their favorite. They also prefer to eat lunchmeat and cheese without bread, and carrots are always better with protein-rich hummus.

My kids also make their own lunches, beginning in kindergarten. Making sure I have a wide variety of healthy choices takes any potential fight out of what they pack.

Shop in Season

One of the most affordable ways to provide healthy lunch choices is to shop in season. Now through early fall, fresh summer fruit will be available at reasonable prices. As fall fades into winter, however, fresh local fruit becomes scarce.

At that point, I rely on fruits like bananas or apples, which remain affordable throughout the year. Switching to vegetables like baby carrots and to different varieties of dried fruit is also inexpensive. These foods are also easy to transport, which makes them ideal to pack in school lunches.

Provide a Loose Guideline

These are foods that I like to have available for my kids to pack in their school lunches. The guideline is that they must pack at least one food in each category, and they can have up two of each for more variety. These choices are easy to pack back and forth, and whatever isn’t eaten at school needs to be brought home.

The Bread Choices

Whole-wheat bread options are filling and work well for school lunches. Foods included in the bread group are:

Bagels (with cream cheese or hummus)
Pita bread
Whole wheat crackers
Sandwiches made from whole wheat slices of bread
Pretzels or pita chips

Typical school lunches... Ewww!

The Dairy Group

Dairy items provide kids with necessary nutrients as well as being filling snacks. Some of these include:

String Cheese
Yogurt packaged in tubes – Gogurt has a all-natural alternative, and you can also make and package your own
Cubed and cream cheese and crackers or fruit
Hard-boiled eggs

Salty Snacks

These salty snacks tend to be higher in protein, requiring smaller portion sizes. Some of these saltier options include:

Pretzels
Beef Jerky
Low-Fat Pepperoni (usually a turkey variety)
Pistachios
Sunflower Seeds
Puffed Rice products
Pita Chips or Carrots and Hummus

Sweet Snacks

It’s surprising how satisfying these more nutritious choices can be to a kids’ sweet tooth. These sweet snacks include:

Fresh Fruit – Blueberries, Strawberries, Bananas, Apples, Grapes, and other budget-friendly fruit that’s in season
Dried Fruit – Mango, Raisins, Apples and Fruit Leather
Dense, Multi-Grain Granola or Granola Bars (Kashi is a great brand)

I like to give my kids the option of buying milk at school or packing 100% juice products. Water is also a great choice!