 The following is a production of New Mexico State University. Welcome to another episode of Long Live La Familia, our nutrition soap opera series that speaks not only to our hearts, but also to our appetites. I'm Kerry Bachman, and I'm your host for the series. Now, if you've been with us before, you know that we normally follow the Sierra family in an episode detailing their challenges with nutrition in their lives. These are the grandma and grandpa Sierra, and they're six adult children. And we also have children of all of these adult children that are often featured in our videos. And that's actually the focus of today's special program. I know many of you have children at home, and you wonder how you can involve them successfully with food preparation and with buying food. Well, that's what we're going to learn more about today. We've got a special program coming up. Rather than looking at an episode with the Sierra family, we're going to learn some specific techniques that you can use to involve your children in three different ways. First, we're going to see how to involve children in selecting and preparing their own healthy snacks. Then we'll find out a little bit about children and how they can help with the purchase of food. And finally, we'll learn something about how kids can actually help get dinner ready when the adults aren't getting home until later. So let's go ahead and get started. What's the first thing you want to do with kids or with adults before you prepare or eat any food? Of course, you want to wash your hands. And that's something we do on every show where we're preparing food. We're not making anything here today, but I still want to emphasize hand washing is a very important thing to get children used to. Children need to be sure that they're washing with warm water, that they're using a lot of soap, and that once they get their hands suds up with the soap, they want to rub and get all of that dirt and bacteria off for 20 seconds. 20 seconds sounds like a long time, but actually if you have the children seeing the ABC song, that's just about 20 seconds, then they can start the rinsing. So once kids have gotten their hands washed, then it's time that they can actually start selecting and preparing their own snacks. Now today we're gonna look at a couple of alternatives to some store-bought snacks that aren't quite as inexpensive or healthy. The first one, this is a really popular type of candy with a lot of kids. Peanut butter chocolate candies. And so we're gonna show actually a healthier alternative that you may remember from one of our Sierra Nutrition episodes. Another thing that kids really like is kind of a mix of cereal and pretzels like a trail mix. And you can buy this at the store, but it's pretty expensive and usually high in salt and fat. So we're gonna show a homemade version of this today. And then finally, of course, you have these package snacks that kids all over seem to love. But did you know that your children can actually select and prepare something very similar that costs you a lot less and will be healthier? Well, let's go ahead now and take a look at our snacks segment. Kids are active all day long, running, jumping, and playing, burning up large numbers of calories. Eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner is a good start for your kids, but may not be enough. To keep them going, kids also need to snack on healthy foods throughout the day. Your family can plan and prepare tasty snacks by referring to the Food Guide Pyramid. If your children lack servings from any of the five food groups, snacks are a good way to catch up. Preparing snacks at home can be fun and easy. It can also save parents lots of money. Before you start to make any snacks, remind your kids to wash their hands. Here are a few ideas you and the kids can try at home. Let's start with some vegetable quesadillas. You'll need some cheese and tortillas. First, grate the cheese. Wash any vegetables you'd like to use. Cut them carefully into small pieces with a knife. Place the vegetables in a small amount of water. Use a covered container in a microwave or a saucepan on the stove. Steam the vegetables until slightly tender. You can use a corn or flour tortilla for this snack. Place the steamed vegetables on a warm tortilla. Next, sprinkle some cheese and your quesadillas are ready to be heated. You can fold one tortilla in half or use two tortillas, whatever is easier for you. You can heat your quesadilla with a microwave or a comal. Just be extra careful when using a stove. Once the cheese is melted, your snack is ready. So eat and enjoy. When your kids want something sweeter, let them make a moonball snack. Unlike candy bars, this snack gives them more than just sugar and fat. Moonballs require only four ingredients. Powdered milk, uncooked oatmeal, honey or corn syrup, and peanut butter. Put the same amount of oatmeal, honey, and peanut butter in a bowl. For example, use one cup of each ingredient. Add twice as much powdered milk. Here, you'll need two cups. Stir with a spoon until it's evenly mixed. Form the mixture into balls using your hands. Pour some extra oats onto a plate and roll the moonballs into the oats. Now you have yourself a tasty treat. If you have any leftovers, you can refrigerate them up to one week. When you're short on time, cold cereal makes a quick snack. Kids can eat it plain or with milk. Try to stay away from the sugary kinds and buy it in large quantities. You'll stretch your dollar and you'll never lack a nutritious and delicious snack. Home or away from home, kids are usually hungry. While prepackaged snacks are tempting, they're often expensive and fattening. Instead, pack a snack at home. Remember, choose foods that will hold up to a child's rough handling and that won't need to be kept hot or cold. Firm fruits like apples are a good choice. Oranges cut into wedges are easy to eat. Vegetables, either whole or sliced, are appetizing. Kids like chewy and crunchy foods, they can make their own trail mix by combining dry cereal, popcorn, pretzels, and raisins. Put the mixture into plastic bags or containers and snacks will be ready when you need them. Whether your kids snack at home or somewhere else, make sure good nutrition follows them. As a parent, you can take the time to teach your kids healthy snacking habits that will last a lifetime. Isn't it amazing what kids can do on their own in the kitchen? Just a couple of reminders to keep in mind as your kids are working in the kitchen. First, if they don't have a lot of experience or they're very young, you wanna make sure that they're supervised until they learn how to safely use a sharp knife and appliances that use heat or things like blenders. The other thing to keep in mind is kids should not be eating snacks when they're running around or playing hard. There's a danger of choking. When you serve a snack or when your kids eat their snacks, encourage them to actually sit down and enjoy them and talk with their friends while they're eating rather than being engaged in active play. Now that active play brings up another thing that's very important to keep in mind. Some children are very active and so they're naturally gonna need to eat larger snacks and perhaps more snacks. Children who are not getting as much activity probably won't need as many snacks. And that's important to keep in mind. Physical activity is the other side of the equation of nutrition. And you want to be able to balance both of those things, both as adults and as children. So it's important to encourage your children to be active, whether it be outside, whether it be in a sport that's organized at school. And if they're active, then those snacks will really help them stay active and also give them nutrients that are very important for their growing bodies. Now let's talk a little bit about the segment that's coming up. We're going to look at how children can help with buying food in the grocery store. Now some of you may say, well, my kids are so little, I don't see how they can help at all. And in fact, they don't help me when I go with them to the store because they distract me. But others of you may have young teenagers or teenage children who really could be doing a lot more to help you out in the grocery store. Think about it for a minute. A teenager is just a few years away from being on their own, perhaps living in an apartment, going to college or having a job. And when those children are on their own, they're not children anymore. They need to have the skills to learn how to select food in the grocery store, how to pay for it without getting overcharged, how to budget their dollars, and what a better place to start when they're at home. So that's something you can start with your children even at a young age. This next segment, we'll see several young girls and also remember, your boys can do this too, doing the family shopping at the grocery store. One of them is actually going for the weekly groceries. The other one is going for a quicker stop to pick up some essential items that they needed for the week. Whichever the case, make sure when you're working with your kids to buy groceries that they understand exactly what you expect them to get and that you give them a sufficient amount of money to purchase it. Let's go ahead now and take a quick look how we can get our kids involved with purchasing groceries. In today's busy world, parents don't always have time to do the grocery shopping. For this reason, more and more children and teens are assuming some of the responsibility for buying their family's food. Whether your kids run to the corner store to pick up just a few items or they buy the week's groceries at a larger store, there are several things they should know. First, just like you, your child should always shop with a list. Write out the list together, putting down the dry goods first, then the produce, and finally, the refrigerated items. Within these categories, organize the list in the same way that the store is set up, so your child won't have to backtrack to find items. Make the shopping list as specific as possible. For example, if you need tomato paste, specify the size can that you want. If your child is very young, also specify the brand name that you know is cheapest. As soon as your children can do simple math, they themselves can look at the price of different brands and choose the best buys. Many stores today have computerized price labels on the shelves that make comparing prices easy. The next time you're at the store with your children, take a few minutes and teach them how to compare prices. All you need to do is look at the unit price printed on the shelf label. The unit price is simply the amount of money that a certain quantity of the product costs. See how much this tomato sauce costs per ounce. This can of tomato sauce is a better buy because it costs less per ounce. Choosing the second can will save you money. See how easy it is. You'll be surprised how quickly your children can learn to compare prices. Once your child has chosen the lowest priced item, he or she should check carefully to make sure it is in good condition. Teach your children not to buy canned goods that are dented or bulging. These are signs that the food inside may have spoiled. Bagged and boxed foods should be inspected for holes and wet spots. Show your children how to squeeze bags gently so they can find the ones that are airtight. This will keep them from buying cereal that has an off taste or that has been invaded by bugs. As your child puts items into the cart, he or she should cross them off the list. That way extra items won't be bought by mistake. Teach your children not to be taken in by seasonal promotions and special sale items. These displays are often located at the ends of the aisles. If you've made out your list carefully, buying something that's not on it will probably not get you anything you really need. Once your child has purchased all of the dry goods on your list, it's time to go to the produce section. Obviously, he or she should not choose anything that is bruised or squishy. Otherwise, each type of vegetable and fruit is different. You will need to show your children the specific things to look for in each kind of produce. When your children have become more experienced shoppers, let them find the best bargains for you in the produce section. For example, just make a general list showing how many pieces of fruit you want for the week. Your child can pick out that many pieces of fruit, choosing the types that are the cheapest and in best condition. The same goes for vegetables. Now it's time to pick up the cold items. Teach your children to get refrigerated items at the end of the shopping trip so that they will stay as cold as possible. When choosing milk, tell your children to pick containers that do not leak. Also, it is important that they check the expiration dates printed on the cartons. Choosing meat is similar to choosing dairy products. Your children should avoid buying leaking packages and should check the date printed on the label. Once your child selects a package of meat, he or she should put it into one corner of the cart so that it won't leak onto the other foods. Once everything on the list has been purchased, it's time to pay for it. As items are rung up, your child should look at the name of the item and its price on the digital display. If the display does not correspond to the item selected, your child should alert the clerk. If you buy your groceries with cash, make sure that you have given your child enough money. In case the money doesn't cover everything in the cart, be sure to tell your child which items not to get. If you buy your groceries with food stamps, be sure that your child is familiar with how to use your EBT card. Because no cash changes hands, it is very important that your child give you back both the store receipt and the EBT receipt. And don't forget to get the EBT card back. Be sure to enter the amount that was deducted from your EBT card into your records. That way, you will know how much money you have left on your card the next time you go to use it. If you find that your child has purchased items that were not on the list, don't let it slide. Insist that your child pay you back. Otherwise, he or she will continue to take advantage of your EBT card and you will not have enough money to buy food later in the month. But don't worry, problems like this won't happen often if you gradually teach your kids how to be smart shoppers. Start the next time you go to the store and teach something new each time you shop. Before you know it, your children will be able to assume many of your family's food buying responsibilities. You will enjoy more free time and your kids will learn skills that will help them out when they have families of their own. It's interesting to see just how much children can help with the grocery shopping. In many families, kids may actually be a burden in the grocery store. But in the last segment, we saw that the two girls actually were really helping their families out. Now, your child may not be ready to go to the grocery store by himself or by herself to purchase the weekly groceries. But as you noticed in the segments, it's also possible to teach your child and go to the grocery store together. You can teach a child how to read labels, how to look at the unit prices to compare prices, how to make sure that the produce they're picking is not of bad quality. Now, the episode, the segment that we just saw didn't really talk too much about younger kids in grocery stores, but they can actually really learn a lot too. Think of your toddler or your preschooler. They're starting to learn their colors and their shapes and they can identify different types of fruits and vegetables. So here's an exciting activity you can do with them. Take along some colored cutouts of either construction paper or other colors that you find in magazines. You can tape over them or laminate them so that they're sturdier. And then ask your child to take several of the colors and go around to the produce section and find vegetables and fruits that match those colors. And then you can actually purchase one or more of those fruits or vegetables. Another thing you can do is actually take labels off of the foods that you're going to be buying. For example, if you're looking to buy some tomato sauce, take the tomato sauce label off of the can and then send your child on a scavenger hunt. They'll be able to look for that exact type of can of tomato sauce and bring it back to the cart. And they'll really feel that they're contributing and you're teaching them some skills that will really help them later on in their own lives. Now it's important also to involve your children before shopping in planning the meals. That way they can kind of see the whole process through from start to finish. And that's what our next segment is looking at. How you involve your children in the kitchen after they've done the grocery shopping. Now you remember that it's something that children need to be kind of learn in an age appropriate way. Not every child is going to be ready to cut with a sharp knife immediately. So be very careful not to assume that your child knows things. At the same time it's important that your child feel challenged. And also that they'd be encouraged to be creative in the kitchen. One of the things that we'll see here is a mix that you can actually make at home that is sort of like the store-bought mix but is much healthier. And then your child will be able to make simple healthy recipes for dinner and get almost all of the food prep out of the way before you get home from work. Again it's another cost savings. Let's go ahead and watch our next episode and learn a little bit about how children can help with food preparation. Moms are busy all day caring for children, cleaning the house, running errands and working at outside jobs. After doing all this they don't always have the time or energy to cook at night. Did you know that your children can help you cook dinner? Yes, both girls and boys can learn to cook entire meals if you teach them slowly and give them plenty of encouragement. Bringing your kids into the kitchen will do more than give you some time off from cooking. When they pitch in, meals can be on the table when you need them to be. That means that you won't be tempted to pick up fast food on your way home to fill the empty stomachs waiting for you. You'll save money by involving your kids in the cooking. Just as important, your children will be positively affected. Kids naturally view cooking as a fun, exciting activity and they will be proud to be able to help you. As time passes, they will gain self-confidence and acquire valuable skills. When the time comes to live on their own, they will be better prepared to do so. When your kids first start out cooking meals for the family, it's best if they begin by doing some of the prep work. You should be there to supervise the first few times so that they fully understand their tasks. Teach them to be careful when using heat-producing appliances, blenders, and knives. Try to be patient and be sure to hand out lots of praise. Do you think that your kids are too young to be of much help? Even preschoolers can wash vegetables and tear lettuce for salads. By the time they are five or six, most kids can cut vegetables if you supervise them carefully. Kids at this age are also very good at cleaning dry beans. They may even be better at it than you are. As your kids become more comfortable in the kitchen, they can progress to more complex tasks. Teach them how to follow recipes as soon as they can read. You can also write out your own instructions for them with pictures if necessary. Write down the time that they are to do each task if you will not be at home to remind them. Go over the instructions with your kids before you go to make sure they understand what they are to do. Certain appliances lend themselves to being used by children to make meals. Crock pots are ideal because all the ingredients cook at once. They do not require much attention once everything is inside. But even if you don't have a crock pot, your kids can still cook main dishes. Stoos are particularly good for kids to make since the quantities of the ingredients do not need to be exact. Let your kids use their imaginations to create delicious and nutritious stews from vegetables and meats that you have on hand. Your children can even make the bread for dinner themselves. Teach older children to make tortillas or biscuits from scratch. Younger kids can make breads from mixes which are quick and easy to use. To save money and to make these breads more nutritious, prepare them from flour and cornmeal mixes that you have made yourself. Check your local extension office or food stamps office for recipes. Round out the meal with salad or some vegetables. A microwave is handy for cooking raw, frozen and canned vegetables. Your children can simply put them in a covered bowl and steam them. Does all this sound too good to be true? Remember, you never know what your kids can do in the kitchen until you work with them. Just have patience and don't expect too much at once. As your children gain more experience and confidence, they will be excited to tackle more complicated tasks. Start today to involve your kids in preparing meals. Your whole family will appreciate their efforts. Who knows, the experience might encourage your child to become a great chef someday. Kids can really help out with food preparation after school hours, especially since many adults both are working outside the home or single parents. And so when the kids come home from school, it helps a lot to have them get dinner ready. That can avoid you spending money on fast food or convenience foods. Your family will eat healthier. You'll tend to eat together at the table. And your children will also feel a real sense of accomplishment and that they're contributing to the family. That's why food preparation is such a great way to involve kids. They naturally enjoy cooking. And that's also a way to get them to help. It's not like doing laundry, which may not be as much fun. Cooking is actually really fun for most kids. Now it's, as you've noticed, it's not always enough to know what is healthy for either adults or children. I might know what a healthy snack is, but unless I have the skills to actually prepare it, I'm not going to eat a healthy snack. And that's where it gets back to really helping your children develop confidence and skills, both in selecting and preparing snacks, in shopping for food at the grocery store, and also in preparing whole meals themselves at home. When your children help you out in these ways, be sure to give them lots of praise and encouragement. You don't want cooking or shopping to become a drudgery. And that's, especially when children get older and become adults themselves, it would be a shame if they've been turned off to cooking because they've been forced to do too much of it. It should always remain fun and exciting. Remember, food is a very fun way to teach practical skills that extend far beyond the kitchen. When a child learns how to read a recipe, that will help them with reading directions in the future on appliances or reading in school. As a child learns how to mix inside of a bowl without spilling, they're learning coordination. So the skills really carry over to other parts of their life as well. Remember, you as a parent are your child's most important role model. If you don't like to cook and your child sees you eating fast foods and convenience foods, your child isn't going to have much incentive to learn to cook themselves. And that's where it's so critical to actually get in the kitchen with your child, go to the store with your child and learn together. If you're not really accomplished or experienced in the kitchen, that's okay. You and your child can learn together and it's a really fun way to interact. For example, think about the three segments that we saw and let's see if we can come up with a goal for you and your family over the next week or so. Perhaps you might wanna work with your child to select and prepare a healthy snack that you saw in our first segment. Or take your child with you to the grocery store and begin to teach them in an age-appropriate way about how to select food. Or finally, help your child learn to prepare some of the foods for dinner time at home by themselves. Now if you'd like, you can call the phone number on your screen and we'll send you some recipes, including the one for the mixes that you can make as an alternative to the store-bought mix. If you call that number, you can also find out more about our free nutrition classes, which we offer all around the state. And in fact, we offer those to both adults and to children. You can work with your kids in the kitchen at home. Your family will be much stronger and your children will learn important skills that they then will pass on to their children. Good luck to you and your children as you work together in the kitchen and the grocery store. Until next time, long live our families. The preceding was a production of New Mexico State University. The views and opinions in this program are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views and opinions of the NMSU Board of Regents.