School-Age

These are incredibly formative years in your child’s healthy habit learning journey! Marked by continues growth and independence, your school-age child is now tasked with more responsibility and decision-making – and that includes many of their daily food choices!

This is an important time to engage your child in the process of planning and preparing their own school lunches. This is a fun interactive activity that can grow into an incredibly valuable life skill!

Planning should be empowering for your child, so give them free reign with the choices that you provide in your home environment. This is also a great opportunity to talk to them about variety and balance, but avoiding descriptive words such as “healthy”, “unhealthy”, “good for you”, “bad for you” – etc. Attaching negative labels to the very foods that our kids are still biologically wired to prefer creates discomfort between two conflicting messages – one they believe (I love cookies!) and one they should believe (cookies are not healthy). Impressing our learned beliefs onto our children is well intended and a normal reaction in parenting, but it’s ineffective and likely to complicate their healthy learning journey. Nutrition Nanny® helps guide parents and their school-age children through this important stage by helping them build confidence, trust and enthusiasm of all foods. 

COVID-19’s Impact on Our Kids 

For many parents today, concerns over their children’s eating habits and their weight had already existed long before March of 2020. But when the pandemic hit, forcing schools to close, and moving kids from in-person learning into online classrooms, a perfect storm for weight gain began to brew.

In very little time, “normalcy” was tossed out the window – and along with it went many of the normal daily schedules and routines that kept our households afloat. During this time, many of us parents and caregivers turned a blind eye to the things that made our cooped-up kids happy – whether it be a few extra snacks, increased screen time or their later-than-usual bedtimes.

So now that our schools are getting back to full capacity and life as we once knew it is slowly getting back to normal, is your child’s pre-Covid weight also getting back to “normal”?  If not, you are not alone.

Nutrition Nanny®’s customized family action plans offer a fun and painless approach to getting your family back on track in the wake of the pandemic shutdown!

Designed by a Registered Dietitian-Nutritionist, our programs are all centered around the entire family – there is no “singling out” individual members or “divvying up” the food environment!  Our approach focuses on the  family unit and empowering all members in shared roles and responsibilities that nurture autonomy while providing structure and routine.