Every year new children come to school for the first time. There are always some children who don’t speak. They are unusually quiet. In class, they have voices softer than a whisper. Their answers are one nearly inaudible word. So teachers watch and listen and wonder. When the newness of the adventure of school wears off, every child comes around to talk to teachers at recess. It’s then that a teacher discovers speech difficulties.

The categories for concern are:

A child simply does not make sense. They babble some words together in a jumble and then stop. It’s not that you can’t hear them, and there are words…but there is no sense to what they have said.

A child talks to you and the mispronunciation of ninety percent of his or her words is so poor, they can hardly be understood.

A child cannot speak in sentences. He or she is still using hands and one word commands or pleas.

A child cannot respond to a question or a direction with any competency.

Base-line reason behind most of these problems? Lack of practice talking.

Culprits? Cell phones, television, and parents and providers who don’t communicate.

When parents spend the majority of their child/parenting time on their phone, the child will suffer a speech loss. When television is “chronically” on during the day as a “diversion” for kids, children will suffer a speech loss. When parents don’t speak WITH their child, the child will suffer speech loss.

Socio-economic classes used to be defined by vocabulary and speech patterns. Accents and local colloquialisms were the American norm. And that is a sign of families spending time with each other. Children learn to speak because of interaction with family members. The “word stretch” was a gift of educated parents who educated their children. When television became the teacher along about 1955, children started to pick up a “television” language, but television was available for a certain number of hours a day. Children still mostly played outside with their siblings and friends, and parents turned off the television at family times and actually spoke to their children.

When families became limited to one child who had no one to play with, the television became a kind of babysitter. When this happened, a syndrome called “a processing disorder” started to rear it’s ugly head. Children could understand, they knew what was going on, but they could not respond intelligently because they were never asked, and parents who used television to this degree, didn’t even notice.  You see, TV does not expect a response, and even if it gets one, it doesn’t care, so learning HOW to respond at the appropriate age is not learned while parents don’t notice.

And now that cell phones dominate many parents’ lives, there will be more difficulties because children need interaction with a parent for speech development – and not the kind of two second responses while they concentrate on one liners from friends who aren’t really friends. Conversation, the ability to discuss a topic or have a back and forth discourse MUST come before a child is five or a child will struggle all his life. That gives parents five years…and those five years come to a close far too quickly.

Discovering the fact that a child has a limited ability to speak, does not mean racing off to the doctor, speech therapist, psychologist or minster. It means re-arranging one special little time during the day EVERY SINGLE DAY so that the child can catch up. This time is meal time.

Meal time…whether it’s breakfast, lunch or dinner or even a snack just before bed, is the most important time during the day for family discussion. It’s the time families should turn off the invading television, cell phones, radio, music equipment, and house phone, and sit down, because sitting means you are not ready to leap away, and TALK to your child. It’s a time to expect a response. To have a child practice speaking back at you. Don’t dominate the time…expect a response…come to expect sentences in return, and spend some time laughing, smiling, and showing the child that this time means something to YOU!

Many studies have been done that show that even more than reading to a child, meal time discussion is more important for a child’s social, emotional, spiritual development than any other single family activity. Children learn who their families are, what they think, what’s important in their lives when families talk to one another in the casual meal time activity that meal time should be. Active participation is important for every single family member.

So…is a child’s speech important enough to turn off the world and show your child that he or she really is the world to you? Within weeks of sitting down to a meal with a  child who has speech difficulties, those difficulties will begin to improve. I promise.

This week I heard from one of my beloved staff that if she were determining snack, it would be broccoli and carrots. Apparently, the whole grain homemade chocolate cupcakes were “junk food.”

There is a concern in an ever fattening world of little exercise, fewer family meals, and more women claiming not to cook, that children will not get what they need at the hands of loving adults. Having passed the forty year mark in caring for children, I’ve put a lot of thought into this and this is what I’ve come up with:

Because they don’t nap, and they run a good part of the day, our children need about 1400 calories a day. If you think about three meals and two snacks, you can roughly say that dividing the day into 300 calories for breakfast, 400 for lunch, 400 for dinner, and 300 for two or three snacks a day will keep a child fully fed and still on the lean side.

Here are some of the problems I’ve encountered:

Many children are not morning eaters; they are not dinner eaters; they are picky and only want the junk that is on the top shelf. When meals are served, they would rather play with the food than eat it, and when meals are not served, they want to play on the last nerves of parents who threw out the child’s last plate of food.

Finding a happy balance has always been my goal. I’ve fed hundreds of children in my life, and feeding children should be a happy occasion for both the children and for those making the food. Cooking and serving meals is an investment in the future of a child’s health in many ways.

Breakfast, according to the state must have a grain product, a fruit or vegetable and milk. Now this can be a happy occasion with a child’s favorite, or this can be a hideous occasion that begins the day in tears: homemade whole grain pancakes, muffins, waffles, coffee cake, sticky buns…orange juice, and milk  OR gruel, canned chickpeas and milk. You call it! Most parents put a bowl of questionable cereal, toaster pastries or a donut in front of children and call it breakfast. In any event, all three breakfasts are about 300 calories.

Now let’s talk about lunch. Lunch is the one meal that can captivate most children, teach the best nutrition, and encourage children to try new things than any other meal. It’s definitely the discovery meal!  That’s why I make lunch at my school into a delicious, nutritious occasion every single day. This is the meal where adults can make the calories go down…and all with smiles…if the adult in charge is smart.

Rules for lunch: make it kid friendly…don’t serve food designed for adults. Most lunches should be finger foods. Small pieces please…fun to eat foods…familiar foods…new foods that look appealing…food that smells good… If lunch is a bologna sandwich on white bread and a soft drink…the calories are there, but the nutrition went south…

At lunch a child should have two ounces of protein, a bread product, and two or more fruits or veggies. Let’s start by saying a sandwich is a terrible food for a child because of its size. Most children only like bread if it’s sweet…like cake and cookies. And when you consider the proportions of a slice of bread to an adult and then to a child, you are expecting a child to eat what looks to him to be the half the size of a crib mattress! If you must make a child a sandwich, cut it in half, and then half again, and only put half of the whole on the plate at a time. Children only need an ounce of bread at a meal.

Best lunches for most children are homemade pizza, tacos, nachos, spaghetti, baked ham, meatballs, baked or homemade chicken nuggets, and breakfast for lunch.

Working whole grains around these meals is easy. Pizza is made with whole grain flour. Tacos are always whole grain and so are nachos. Corn is the best grain going – more nutrition than any other grain. Spaghetti noodles that are whole “grain” rather than whole wheat are much more palatable to a child. Baked ham, meatballs, chicken  can be served with whole grain noodles, brown rice or even whole grain fun bread.

Now for the fruits and veggies. I always put three fresh fruits or veggies on the table every day for my group of forty children. If I serve a canned fruit – and I usually only serve applesauce from a can – I make sure that everything else is fresh. Ninety percent of what we serve is fresh. If I serve applesauce, I might serve it with carrots, either cooked or raw, and melon…so there are two fruits and a veggie. If I serve potatoes, I might serve it with grapes and apples. This way, children can choose from cooked, fresh, fruit and veggies every day. If a child eats a good lunch, if it is served like this, he will easily consume 400 calories when you include milk.

Now let’s get down to the original question: snack.

If a child has had 300 solid calories for breakfast, and another 400 for lunch, he’s only had 700 calories for the day. That’s half of what he needs for the day. Many children are not dinner eaters, and will do anything in their power to escape dinner…so it’s time to think big and get the calories into the child best we can.

Human beings love sweets. It begins with the super sweet taste of breast milk, and continues through life with the treasures of sugar and confections and treats. Now, here’s the rub: sugar is touted as a bad food even though if it’s not a protein, it’s a sugar. Sugar is only a bad food when we indulge in it.  In a world where we indulge in just about anything, it’s no wonder we are at odds with this very natural and delicious substance known as “sweet.”

So the idea is to make the sugar snack into the best thing the child ate all day…both by taste and by nutrition. Is it possible? Possibly.

Our teachers bake for our kids every day. We make cookies, cupcakes, brownies, and a host of incredible tasting food kids just love and need! And I believe children need the calories of a fun snack at the end of a long and work filled day. That’s why I don’t serve broccoli and carrots for snack. Children need a snack that will carry them through to dinner, and after a lunch of fruits and vegetables, children need something different.

So what’s in the home baked snack? Whole grain flours, sugar, real butter, fresh farm eggs – I have an egg lady – milk, baking soda and powder, cocoa, spices, cheese, salt. There are no chemical lists on our home made food…so the only hitch is the sugar. I make a lot of my own brown sugar…using sugar cut with date syrup…the calorie count on one of our snacks is about 300 calories when you add the milk…and that brings us up to 1000.

If children go home, they will most likely take in at least another snack or maybe a light dinner and that will complete their calorie day. If they go to fast food and eat a quarter of their greasy meal, it’s still about 400 calories, and that’s still not a bad calorie take on a day.

And as they go out the door, we know that they have had three glasses of milk, four fruits and veggies, at least one protein, and three whole grain products. They have had a lot of fun with their eating and they may have learned something new or tasted a new food.