How to Prepare A Healthy School Lunch for Your Kids

Parents face problems while packing lunch for their school going kids . Packing lunches can become either the most painful or most fun part of mom’s days’ cooking. Moms always have complained that the kids don’t finish their lunch in the school. Every mother is happy when her child eats well and worried if not. School-going children require a lot more energy and nutrients for their growing body than adults.
The challenge
With only 20 minutes to eat in the lunch time, kids should be given “fast food” that can be finished easily as well as have nutritional value. The food given to children for school should be healthy, tasty and loaded with nutrients.
Children sometimes are picky, they pay attention to food texture, color and taste. In addition, you need to be aware of the food containers, especially plastic containing phthalates and bisphenol-A (BPA).
The solutions
Children’s school lunches need to have proteins, fiber, and good fats to stabilize blood sugar. The rapidly rising blood sugar affects children by cascading down too quickly and too low. It affects mood as well as attention. Drop in blood sugar can lead to irritability , hunger, headache, lack of focus, behavior problems, and cravings for quick sugar fix which keeps the cycle going on. This hinders learning and can disrupt class.
Thus, basic rule for any meal preparation and especially when preparing school lunch are:
Avoid foods which raise blood sugar quickly. These include sugar, sodas, candy, sweets, juices and any refined grains like pretzels, bread, crackers, bagels, chips on an empty stomach. Limit the sugar and keep the refined carbohydrates limited.
Stay away from sodas(regular and diet). A healthy diet has no place for sodas, which are high in phosphorus that depletes healthy nutrients. They remove vitamins and minerals from the body. Add water, diluted juices, seltzer water with juice to flavor or vegetable juice in the lunch instead.
Promote protein. The increased requirements of protein among growing children should meet demands of the growth. Protein packed choices include fish, poultry, meat, eggs, beans, nuts and seeds. A child may need one to two ounces and a teen/adult may need three to five ounces of protein a day.
Include fiber. High fiber option includes fruit, beans, nuts,seeds and whole grains. These are very important in case your child does not eat vegetables.

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Helping Children with Visual Deficits

When interacting with children born with profound vision problems including blindness, the aim should be to help the children master their ability to comprehend experiences fully, even those experiences that would ordinarily be taken in through sight, as well as mastering each stage of emotional development.
If you move to the left and right of the baby while talking to her in warm and inviting tones, although you know that baby cannot see, she follows and localizes the source of the sound and may move her head in that direction. In this way the baby is constructing a “visual map,” trying to sense where things are in the space around her.
If she turns towards the sound but cannot see you, you can take her hand in your hand and put it next to your mouth so that she feels your mouth moving. She can experience the source of the sound. Similar things can be done with the smell for slightly older babies. You can simply put interesting scent like lemon juice on your fingers so that the baby can take an interest in the smell and try to locate your hand in space.
With a 15-16 month old baby who doesn’t have this spatial road map, you can do similar exercises matching the child’s motor skill. For example, you can coax her into little “Can you find me?” games by giving treats such as kisses and snacks when she finds you. In this way the baby is motivated to create a spatial road map as well as to take action.
At each stage the principle remains the same. With second stage, the baby needs to experience warmth and pleasure through touch, smell, rhythmic movement and sound. The child will be able to get a mental picture of a joyful parent beaming at her. The child may even smile back even though she cannot see the father talking to her rhythmically with a joyful smile. The daddy can take her hand to his face so that she can touch his mouth and get a kiss on her hands. In this way she will get a sense of where the pleasurable sound is coming from. .

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Helping Children with Hearing Deficits

Parents and caregivers help children with hearing challenges achieve full emotional and cognitive abilities and social interaction despite hearing loss. They basically need to help such children master other senses to reach all developmental stages.
A newborn baby who is hearing deficit uses sight and touch, unlike babies who use sounds. As a parent or caregiver, make more use of soothing touch, head nods and rhythm to convey the warmth and regulations normally conveyed when speaking. You can experiment with smell along with touch and sight for helping him learn to coordinate motor and sensory input.
Two-way communication is essential. This can be done through facial expression, different kind of touch and object exchange. Parents have to be more animated in their facial expressions. You should be more animated, more demonstrative and subtler in the way you engage the child. You need to have a ”Yes, good, go on,” and ”no no” look and the joyful ”Aha” expression very clearly on your face. Your child can also regulate his behavior the way you hold his hand gently or firmly.

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