The school gates have shut for eight weeks, and the ice cream van has already learned the exact time your children’s hearing becomes superhuman. Welcome to the summer holidays people. Lovely in theory, a little feral in practice. Here is something no one seems to tell us about – the biggest change in summer is not the weather or the lie-ins. It is that all the structure vanishes overnight.
During term time the day has rails. Breakfast before the run, lunch at a fixed time, dinner when everyone gets home. Summer takes those rails away and replaces them with one endless, rolling question. “Can I have a snack?” And so begins the grazing – for both you and the kids!
Why grazing creeps in
Grazing is what happens when food has no shape to the day. The kids are bored, the cupboard is right there, and saying yes is easier than the alternative. Before long they are eating little bits constantly from ten in the morning until bedtime, and you end up in the ‘no man’s land’ of not hungry and not full.
The problem is not the odd treat. It’s when said treats become the background hum of the entire day. Research on appetite consistently shows that constant grazing blunts our natural hunger signals. We stop registering proper hunger and proper fullness, and we end up eating more overall while enjoying it less.
Children are no different. An ice cream on the beach is a brilliant thing. An ice cream, three eclairs, a bag of Haribo, two tins of Pringles and a cookie the size of your youngest’s head, then “I’m still hungry” by half past four is just a day with no edges.
Anchor the day, then relax
Our bodies love routine, but you do not need a military timetable. You need three anchors. A proper breakfast, a proper lunch, a proper dinner, at roughly the same times each day. Get those three in and everything in between calms down on its own. Hunger has somewhere to land and thus, less ‘grazing’.
Around those anchors, genuinely let summer be summer. The ice cream is fine. The day out with chips is fine. These are memories, not nutritional emergencies, and a childhood with no ice cream in it sounds miserable. The aim is for treats to be events, not the default setting.
Is it hunger, or is it the heat?
Here is a useful one for the warm days. We are surprisingly bad at telling thirst from hunger, and children are worse. A child who says they are starving twenty minutes after lunch is very often just thirsty, especially when it is hot and they have been running about. Try water first.
A drink and ten minutes, and the “hunger” frequently disappears. If it does not, fine, feed them. But you will be amazed how often the answer was a glass of water and a bit of patience and if your little one doesn’t enjoy water (even with those weird air-up filters that were all the rage two years ago), then (and don’t tell your dentist) there really is nothing wrong with no added sugar squash or even sparkling water.
Front-load the protein
If you do one thing this summer, make breakfast and lunch contain proper protein. Eggs, Greek yoghurt, cheese, beans, chicken, fish. Protein keeps children (and you) fuller for longer, which means less of the constant grazing, fewer meltdowns at four o’clock, and steadier energy for whatever the day throws at them. It is the single most useful nutrition habit there is, and it costs no more than a cupboard of snacks.
A day with three solid meals, water on hand, and treats that feel like treats is a day where everyone eats better and enjoys it more. Including you. So, have the ice cream. Just maybe not as the warm-up act, the main event and the encore.
By Paul Evans
Registered Nutritionist & Nutrition Consultant across the UK. For clarity or more information reach out to me at paul@thenutritionistuk.com @paulthenutritionist If you want more direct, practical advice like this without the usual fluff, tune into my podcast No Forking Nonsense. I give parents the real, evidence-based guidance they need to understand children’s nutrition without guilt or confusion.
