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Good Snacks for Kids

Providing good snacks for your kids is actually a lot less challenging than you would expect. You can provide healthy alternatives to junk food and with a little creativity, you can create a snack experience that is fun and exciting as well as healthy for your kids.

  1. Fun with Fruits & Vegetables

    • Kids are often intrigued by exciting foods and can be encouraged to try new, healthy snacks if they are cut into odd shapes. Try cutting new fruits and vegetables that you will be introducing to your kids into shapes such as half-moon kiwis, melon spheres or jicama cubes. Parents can also use creativity to make good snacks for kids like dipping a banana in yogurt, rolling it in crushed cereal and placing it in the freezer to create an alternative frozen treat to sugary popsicles. Combine fruit such as a banana, frozen strawberries and low-fat yogurt, and blend to make a healthy smoothie snack.

      Vegetable soups make a good snack that kids can prepare themselves in the microwave and eat with whole-grain crackers or pretzels. Serve a baked potato with salsa and cheese or create a veggie collage using cauliflowers for clouds, broccoli for trees, tomatoes and carrot flowers with celery stems and a slice of squash for the a sun. Create finger-food snacks that are kid-friendly by making snack kabobs made of grapes and cheese that are slid onto pretzel sticks.

    Creative Snack Ideas

    • Use various cookie cutters to cut out shapes of sandwiches to create various, exciting shaped sandwiches such as a heart, star or smiley face. Toss the bread and opt for a tortilla to serve with mustard, low-fat lunch meat such as ham or turkey with cheese; roll up and serve for a good snack for your kids. Make your kids laugh with an inside-out sandwich by wrapping lunch meat and sliced cheese around a sesame stick

    Healthy Sweet Snacks

    • Create a banana split alternative by topping a banana with your choice of frozen yogurt flavors and sprinkling with granola or whole-grain cereal. Entice your kids with a healthy version of a rocky road desert by crushing a graham cracker into low-fat chocolate pudding and sprinkling it with miniature marshmallows. Design a parfait made of layers of low-fat vanilla yogurt, blueberries, mandarin oranges and/or strawberries and granola, or create a portable good snack for your kids by filling up a waffle cone with fresh fruit such as strawberries, raspberries and blueberries and top with low-fat vanilla yogurt.

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