When your children school lunch always comes back half eaten or not eaten at all, you should pay serious attention to this problem. Children are usually picky eaters, they are not really interested in eating when you don’t pack the right meal for them. As parents, it’s your job to ensure your kids get all their nutrition and vitamins, lunch is much more important for school-aged children than for adults. Healthy lunch can power your children both mentally and physically, it’s an essential to help children grow successfully and healthfully. In most countries, eating in the middle of the day is a ritual, it’s a way to re-energize our body, to increase our focus and concentration.

The second reason why children refuse to eat their lunch is because eating their packed lunch feels not as fun as lunchtime activities. This happens more often than you think, children prefer to play with friends compared to sit and eat their lunch. That’s why it’s important to make lunch eating fun and quick without sacrificing the quality of the meal, stay away from sweat treats that can fill your kids up leaving little room for real nutritional food.

Here are some tips to encourage your children to finish their school lunch:

1. Create bite-sized and portable lunch. The bite sized food gives an impression that children can eat them fast without losing much time to play with their friends. Instead of a big sandwich, you can cut it to pieces, add some slices of fruit, tiny biscuits, and so on.

2. Involve your children in the making of their lunch. This is a good idea especially when dealing with picky eaters. You can ask them what they want to eat, or give them some available choices such as: apple or peach, tiny muffin or some crackers, pizza or sushi, etc. Children love to have a sense of control of what they’re going to eat.

3. Include extra healthy snacks that your children love. You can arrange this with the teacher to give them the snacks only after they finish their lunch.

4. Easy to open lunchbox. Yes, it sounds weird but actually hard to open lunchbox discourage your children from eating their lunch. They don’t want to spend the first 5 minutes of their break time just to try to open their lunchbox. You can also help them practice to open the container at home.

5. Be creative. A set of attractive meal can also encourage children to eat more. However, you also need to offer a variety of foods to prevent boredom, they might appreciate Pikachu shaped rice, but not so much if you keep giving it to them for a week.