Education and health professionals agree: a balanced, healthy breakfast is the best way to start the day.  The impact of missed breakfast on our children’s educational performance is quite remarkable.  Breakfast provides the fuel needed for concentration throughout the school day as well as essential energy needed for playground adventuring and the walk to school.   If breakfast is a battleground, read on …

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Choice makes a difference

Offer a variety of healthy breakfasts (NEVER sugar-based – see our previous post on morning routines), so that your child can have a degree of choice.  If the mornings are too rushed for choosing, ask them to choose the night before.  

Portability helps

If your child often runs out of time for breakfast make it portable.  Wholegrain toast or oatcakes, nut butter (cashew, almond or peanut butter are all great) and a banana should keep them going and provide vital nutrients (but don’t let them take nut butter into school, in case other children are allergic – they should also wash their hands when they get there).

Smoothly does it

If your child is very resistant to eating in the mornings, make a fresh fruit smoothie.  Pop some bananas, berries (frozen is fine), peaches, plums or any other soft fruit into the blender and whizz it up in seconds.  It’s not a completely adequate breakfast but it is very nourishing and will keep them hydrated.  Do add a handful of oats if you can get away with it.  You can buy smoothies ready made but freshly made smoothies retain more nutrients and is far cheaper.

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Explain

Make sure your child understands why it’s important to eat breakfast.  Even a very young child can understand that eating breakfast helps them to concentrate and learn in class and gives them energy to play with their friends.  Most children will make an effort to eat breakfast once they understand why they should.

Recycling with benefits

If your child is a mini-eco warrior, show them www.lovefoodhatewaste.com.  Up to 1/3 of the food we buy is wasted with serious consequences for the environment.  It is thought that if all of us in the UK stopped wasting food that could have been eaten it would have the same environmental advantage as taking 1 in 4 cars off the road.  Help your child to see eating breakfast as recycling with benefits and they’ll cheerfully shovel porridge in no time!

Reward success

When all else fails, a star chart works wonders!  Give them a time limit of, say 15  minutes in which to eat all (or most of) their breakfast.  Offer an appropriate reward for a full school week of finished breakfasts, but don’t be tempted to undo all your good work by taking them to a fast food outlet for some deep fried stuff.  Home made pancakes with maple syrup as a weekend breakfast is a brilliant treat, but if time is an issue why not offer a non-food reward?

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For further reading,  this government study looks at several studies across the world on the effect of breakfast and other nutritional factors on education performance.  If you have ever questioned how a healthy breakfast can boost school performance, read this article to find out how children who eat porridge for breakfast get better results.

We are all so rushed in the morning that we don’t have time to focus on breakfast but any educator will tell you the difference a healthy breakfast makes to academic capacity is vast, so please try it for a month and see how your child improves.

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