Your child’s physical needs are important.

Schedule a meal-planning day.

• Make breakfast plans that ensure your child gets a nutritious breakfast each day before school.  Choose things that don’t require too much effort in the morning when everything is so hectic. Try to think of things that can be frozen ahead and just thawed out overnight or microwaved in the morning.  Remember that an egg can be fried solid (no liquid yolk), refrigerated and turned into an egg sandwich in the morning.  Fast food restaurants do it all the time.
• Make lunch plans. Agree on what will go with the child for lunch. Food or money?  If food, what food?  Come to an agreement about what the child will eat. Give choices while doing the plans, but not too many choices. I wish I had been part of this type of planning when I was in school.  My mother used to put uncooked hot dogs in my lunch.  Even today the thought of it turns my stomach – although my kids think its pretty funny.  To them this sounds like having to eat some rare food like some kind of a bug.
• Make after-school snack plans.  For a young child, make sure the plan is for something immediate without long preparation required.  School can make a child over-the-top hungry. I used to greet my kindergartner at the front door with a spoonful of peanut butter – straight up, not on anything. It made the difference between it being my familiar child that returned home or some wild child I didn’t know coming to my door.  If you won’t be at home, make sure things are available in the frig or cupboard and that everybody knows (child and caregiver) what foods are allowed.