Snacks

Growing up, my house didn’t have snack foods like chips or cookies. They weren’t necessarily forbidden foods, but they weren’t something that was in my pantry. I remember when I’d go to slumber parties as a teenager, I’d be pretty excited if there were chips. I still can remember that excitement about having these snack foods without my parents around and I typically would eat a lot of them. Yes, chips are quite tasty, but they also had more value to me because they were limited in my world. Recently, I wrote about 3 things parents can do to promote positive nutrition and healthy relationships with food at home — Focus on Family Meals, Practice Basic Meal Planning and Offer a Variety of Foods. I’ve been thinking over the last couple of weeks about elaborating on the concept of variety and the complexities of variety when feeding children.

“Clean eating” and diet culture have created fear around feeding children certain foods. Variety is important so …

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