Toddlers and children have much smaller stomachs than adults and will naturally get hungry between meals. A healthy snack, given twice a day, will therefore stave off feelings of hunger at the same time as providing significant nutritional benefits and sustaining energy levels. So, today, we take a look at some easy and healthy snack ideas for toddlers and young children, plus any considerations around them. Our article may help to give parents and caregivers some guidance and inspiration around the subject of snacks that are both enjoyable and beneficial for the little ones.
Safety Considerations
First, though, some safety considerations should be mentioned. When feeding infants, toddlers and young children, it’s especially important to be mindful of their safety around food, for example in relation to allergens, choking hazards (e.g. due to inappropriate size and shape of food pieces) and eating anything that will be bad for their health or wellbeing. Always seek medical advice if you have any concerns.
Age Matters & Portion Sizes
Portion size is important for under-fives in particular. After all, you don’t want to make portion sizes so big that they put children off. Look out for signs like toddlers ignoring their plate, closing mouths when food is offered or, of course, spitting it out. These are all signs that the toddlers are probably full. It’s better to give smaller portions and then offer more if they clear their plate or otherwise indicate that they’re still hungry.
- For rice, beans and starchy foods like those, one portion is about the size of the child’s cupped hand.
- For fish or meat (proteins), one portion is about the size of the palm of the child’s hand.
- For fruit and cereal, one portion is roughly the size of the child’s fist.
- An appropriate portion size for one type of vegetables is, in theory, about the size the child’s cupped hand. However, it is not necessary to limit vegetable intake so much as the other food types. Indeed, should the child still be hungry after eating their entire meal or snack, giving them more vegetables rather than anything else is a good, healthy approach.
Only giving age-appropriate foods is also important, so do your research, especially for babies and infants. See our links in the sections following below and always carefully read labels.
A Word About Foods to Avoid Giving Infants
Today’s article is really aimed at the toddler age group. However, for younger children especially, there is a whole list of foods – aside from possible allergens – that it’s best to avoid. Most of them are suggested as foods to avoid because they contain too much salt, added sugar or saturated fats for babies and infants to safely ingest. However, there are also a few others that are best avoided for completely different reasons. We wrote a great guide to all of the foods to avoid in our, “A-Z of Foods to Avoid Giving Your Infant”. That guide is available by clicking the bold green link in this paragraph.
And a Word About Allergens
It’s also important to be vigilant to the possibility of your child being allergic to certain foods, particularly any that they have not tried before. The good news, however, is that we published a whole guide called, “Rough Guide to Food Allergens for Infants”, which can be read by clicking the bold green link in this paragraph. It takes you through symptoms to look out for, the most common food allergens and how to most safely introduce new foods to your little one.
Snacks for Toddlers
The NHS recommends that a toddler has two healthy snacks a day. This is easy to accomplish with a bit of planning and, as we said before, toddlers’ stomachs aren’t very big, so we are not talking about large amounts of food. The portion size of the snacks can later grow as your toddler does (see section on portion sizes earlier in this article).
Making each snack look appealing is the key to encouraging your toddler to try them. So, the addition of healthy but tasty dips, combining snacks that have rich colours or even making the food into face shapes and suchlike will help toddlers to engage more readily.
Some Simple but Healthy Snack Ideas for Toddlers:
Muffins or rice cakes with cream cheese used as a spread or dip.- Mashed avocado with vegetable sticks or Pita slices. You may sweeten the avocado with a bit of honey¹ if your toddler prefers.
- Cut fruit, vegetable sticks or Pita slices served with houmous as a dip.
- Plain (non-flavoured), unsweetened yoghurt with some added fruit pieces, suitably cut.
- Sliced, hard-boiled egg.
- Watermelon sticks.
- A variety of vegetable sticks such as celery, pepper, carrot and/or broccoli.
- Fruit cocktail with grapes², banana, apple and/or strawberry. If using tinned rather than fresh fruit, ensure the fruit is in its own juice rather than in syrup.
- Cheese sticks or small cheese cubes can be served with a cracker or Pita breads.
- Home-made smoothies using, for example, banana, strawberry, raspberry or mango. Use plain, unsweetened yoghurt or milk.
- Home-made mini sandwiches. These can be cut into small fingers or cubes. You could use fillings such as lean ham, houmous, mashed avocado, cheese (either grated or cream cheese).
1. Never give honey to children under the age of 1 as it contains bacteria that produces toxins in the intestines of babies/infants.
2. Grapes and other foods or pieces of similar shape should be sliced down into quarters so they’re no longer potential choking hazards.
Healthy Snacks at Leaps & Bounds Day Nursery
At Leaps & Bounds Nursery, we subscribe to the Startwell guidelines on healthy eating and give children one healthy snack approximately mid-morning and another approximately mid-afternoon. These are healthy snacks too, for example fruit, vegetables or rice cakes. In this way, snacks are nutritious, stave off hunger, and help children to maintain decent levels of energy throughout their day. Children are always supervised around eating, of course, with any allergies catered for and staff being mindful in respect of any potential choking hazards.
Learn more about the Startwell Scheme here and learn more about our approach to healthy eating and encouraging children to be active here.
Nursery Places at Leaps & Bounds, Edgbaston
Leaps & Bounds is a nursery and pre-school in Edgbaston, Birmingham. We are also near Ladywood, Bearwood, Harborne and Smethwick, so may suit families in those locations too. All childcare funding options are supported, including free childcare hours for 2, 3 and 4-year-olds for eligible families (follow that last link for more information and options). Register your child for a nursery or pre-school place today, ask for a guided tour of the nursery or ask us any questions that you may have and we’ll be pleased to help.
Today we look at the topic of baby-led weaning in a follow-up to 
While 
Except in special cases, it is normal to start any kind of weaning around the age of six months and the same is true for baby-led weaning. This is usually done by introducing a just small amount of solids per day initially. This can be done at any time of the day and does not have to follow usual feeding times. The idea of the small initial introduction is to get your infant used to taking solids in addition to their breast or formula milk. Indeed, their milk remains the most important part of their diet right up until the age of one.
Fruit and vegetables are probably the easiest finger foods to start with.
Between 6 to 7 months, additional soft foods can be given as finger foods. So, you could add small fingers of ripe avocado, ripe (i.e. soft) mango and soft melon. You can also try your infant on soft cheese fingers using mozzarella or ricotta (never before 6 months though), so long as they’re made from pasteurised milk and are not mould-ripened (like Brie), veined (like Stilton) nor made from ripened goats’ cheese. Cheeses high in salt and saturated fats should also be avoided for the young. Omelette fingers are also a good choice, so long as the eggs are fully cooked and anything added to a Spanish omelette (e.g. vegetables) is also sufficiently soft.
By the age of 10 to 12 months, your little one’s food offerings start to look much more similar to standard family meals. For example they may have progressed to cooked pasta and cut-up meatballs (or the vegetarian/vegan equivalent). They may now enjoy pitta bread pieces with hummus, perhaps cut-up cheese sandwiches (see aforementioned note about cheeses and also avoid bread that’s got added salt). Steamed/boiled potatoes or vegetables with shredded chicken, turkey or beef are another option – all, of course, suitably cooled and cut into small pieces for the child.
In a follow-up to our 
The thinking with this traditional approach is that puréed food is safer for very young babies too. It may also be easier for them to consume (most have no teeth at weaning age). Pulped vegetables or fruit, for example, will have been blitzed in a blender to a point where there are no lumps and the food is simply in a lovely purée form. The traditional wisdom is also that its pulped form will significantly reduce the potential choking risk that would otherwise apply if the food hadn’t been puréed. However, see our note below about 
In contrast to traditional weaning using puréed food, a more recent approach that’s become quite popular is baby-led weaning. However, because it’s quite a big topic in its own right, we have published 
Weaning is an exciting milestone. However, it can be both fun and challenging in equal measure. Each baby is individual. While some babies take to eating solids like ducks to water, others take longer to adapt. Their expressions are the real giveaway, so watch out for those. It’s a whole new experience for them and remember; they are going from knowing only warm milk to a whole new world of unfamiliar textures and tastes.
Don’t stress if things get messy — this is totally natural and can easily be mitigated through use of a bib (e.g. a pelican bib).
Hygiene and safety around food preparation is important to everyone’s health and wellbeing. However, it’s even more important for babies, infants and toddlers. At this age they are fragile and have low resilience against bacteria, toxins and potential food poisoning. The fall-out from poor standards around food preparation could therefore make little ones very ill or, in the worst cases, even prove fatal. With that in mind, today’s article outlines ways that parents/guardians of children can take appropriate precautions when preparing and serving food to little ones.
Always clear and clean your surfaces.
Tie long hair back to avoid it coming into contact with food.
Always store raw meat and fish away from other foods. Store each separately in covered containers on the bottom shelf of the fridge. This prevents drips falling onto other foods.
Do not reheat rice or cooked food more than once. As we said above, particular care needs to be taken with rice.
Remind your child to wash their hands before they eat and that it’s a matter of hygiene.
We do, of course, follow all best practices at Leaps & Bounds Day Nursery. We are rated with the full 5 stars in terms of food hygiene and preparation and also won the Gold Quality Award, Birmingham City Council’s “Healthy Setting Award” and have completed various quality assurance schemes.
We previously looked at the 
Mustard, celery, the preservative/antioxidant sulphur dioxide, the legume lupin and molluscs are the next most common food allergens after those listed in the table above. Kiwi, the fruit, is also known to cause allergic reactions in some infants, however is apparently the only potential allergen out of those listed above that doesn’t have to be listed, by law, on the ingredients list of pre-packaged food products.
Amounts can later be increased, bit by bit over the following days, if the infant is found to be tolerant. And, of course, a new food type can then be tried only once the previous one has ‘passed the test’. However, bear in mind that some allergic reactions are far from immediate. Known as non-IgE food allergies, their symptoms can take anywhere from 2 hours to 3 days to show. So, the message is to be very careful and methodical when it comes to introducing new foods to your infant.1
The NHS recommends “exclusive breastfeeding or First Infant Formula” milk for babies during their first six months (and, indeed, 
Meals at Leaps & Bounds Day Nursery are freshly made, using high quality, nutritious ingredients, which are prepared for us by award-winning early years caterers. Healthy snacks, meals and drinks are all included in our nursery fees, as appropriate. We cater for all dietary needs (e.g. vegan, vegetarian etc.) and, of course, are mindful — and hugely careful — about any allergies amongst the little ones. We also participate in 
Is your child a fussy eater? If so, it can be rather frustrating for parents or guardians. It could also lead to a poorly balanced diet, which would be bad from a number of health and wellbeing perspectives. The good news, though, is that there are lots of things that parents can do to potentially cure the problem. Today’s article offers a handy guide to dealing with toddlers and preschoolers who are fussy about food.
That, above, is one of the main secrets of encouraging children to accept a particular food i.e. getting them to try, try, … and try it again. It can sometimes take 10 to 15 times before they’ll realise that, actually, it tastes pretty good now they’re used to it! It’s the very definition of an ‘acquired taste’ when you think about it and this seemingly odd facet of human nature is worth explaining to under-fives. It could encourage them to try more things.
Another way to encourage children to eat foods they are not keen on trying is to make them more appealing and entertaining. A plate of food could be made into a picture, for example. Broccoli could be used to represent trees, a mound of peas could represent a hilltop and cut up carrots could be made to look like a sun, perhaps. Pictorial themes might include faces, the countryside, space and exploration, animal shapes, rainbows, the seaside, the weather and so on. Children will naturally engage with this concept and it will make food fun.
Then, of course, there is the old favourite for the youngest of the children — pretending the food on the spoon is a train, car or plane coming towards them! This, with suitable sound effects from the parent, makes every mouthful great fun!
Getting children involved in all aspects of food may also encourage them to try different things and to accept them. Examples would include letting them choose the vegetables or fruit from the supermarket shelves, allowing them to be involved (under supervision) in the meal preparation and even helping them to 
If a child is hesitant about trying a particular food, let them see you eat – and enjoy – some of it. You are their primary role model, after all. As we said before, remind them, perhaps, that it’s ‘yummy’ or that their friend or TV hero enjoys it. Children instinctively learn from their parents, guardians, adults and role models, so this is a very natural way to encourage them to eat things they really should be eating.
