Question for the parents who have unlimited access to healthy snacks.

We’ve been trying this but ran into a few issues and I’d love some feedback from those who do this successfully.

Our first question is do you ever restrict it? Two issues have arisen, one they eat a bunch of fruit right before dinner and then don’t want dinner but are hungry again like half an hour later. Do you take the stuff away for an hour before meal times or something like this? The second issue is that I’ll have for example 6 oranges out, 2 for each kid but they aren’t designated or anything and my 4 year old will eat all of them! (She’s the main one that gorges on fruit and doesn’t eat meals). Do you ever have to get each kid their own basket or something?

My second question is how do you instill that they have to finish one thing before starting the next? I might have 3 bananas, a cup of strawberries, and some carrots. Then I’m left with three half eaten bananas, strawberries with a tiny bite out of each tip and some half eaten carrots. Or is this just part of the gig? Maybe I need to leave less food? One thing we do to combat this is we take the leftover fruit and throw it in a fruit smoothie and they are about that. But I’d love to not have to clean up scraps and just use full fruits and not all the stuff can go into a smoothie.

Please don’t judge!! We’re struggling! Our kids are still young so maybe it will get better with age, but we’d love to get good habits going early.

Edit: thank you everyone so much! I think many of these suggestions are going to really help. We’re now going to try to cut off snacks, esp fruit an hour before meal time and have a variety of food groups with some adult intervention on things like finishing what you start/one at a time and saving some for others until they get a little older.