Curious about eating low-carb? Here's a week's worth of meals to get you going.

We asked some of our favorite foodie parents what school lunch looks like for their kids from first grade through high school.

I think we all need to hear this.

One mom finally found a solution to getting her kids to eat their salads — by making them fun.

Here’s a few of our favorite family dinners that don’t require more than a few minutes to get out on the table.

Everyone around the table wins.

My main struggle with snacks is that when I’m bored, I want to snack. My daughter is the same way, but it was hard for her to accurately gauge (not to mention communicate) if she was bored or actually hungry — especially when she was a toddler. My husband and I would inevitably find that in the window of time before dinner, she would come clamoring up to us, asking for a snack. Out of this came our family’s most important snacking rule, and one I try to get everyone to follow.

March brings without warning a little bit of busyness back to our slow winter routine. There are Girl Scout cookies to sell, field clean-up days for t-ball, and the like amid our regular weeknight routines of dinner, homework, and baths. This week is particularly busy and includes a few nights where we have just an hour to eat together before dashing off or one or more grown-ups is out of the house for meetings.

There was a year or two of my life where it felt like every week I was being added to a meal train for friends welcoming new babies, or moving, or losing loved ones. If you’re not familar, meal trains are calendars that coordinate meals for our loved ones, usually when they’re going through a life change. Maybe they’ve just had a baby and are busy with diapers and new sleep routines. Maybe they’re grieving over the loss of a parent so they can’t cook for themselves.

There are many parenting paradigms that really needed to be examined with fresh eyes and approached in a totally different way. Case in point? Our obsession with getting kids to eat more fruits and vegetables. It can be tempting to approach the end of some seasons — the holidays, lax summer seasons, or even vacation — with an inclination to get our families, especially young kids, to eat better.

Kids love slime, kids love Jell-O, kids love eating whatever they’ve just spent the last hour throwing on the floor, and now that JELL-O is producing “Edible Slime,” all three of those things have converged.

Toddler parents know this one thing to be true: A hungry toddler is a cranky toddler. And while we’re often in a rush to feed our littlest eaters before they melt down, we also want to make sure they are regularly trying new foods and getting balanced nutrition, too. Need fresh ideas? We got you. Some of my fellow editors (all parents!) and I brainstormed a massive list of our favorite easy and wholesome toddler food ideas — and below, you’ll find all of them.

“How can I get my kids to eat more vegetables?” is a question I get often as a mom who also cooks and writes about food for a living. It is also a question that I ask myself often. Vegetables are a pain point at mealtimes because parents know they are nutrient-dense, but kids often think they taste gross (even when they are coated in cheese and butter).

Parents will go to extreme lengths to get picky eaters to eat something. When my boyfriend was a kid, for example, he would only eat pizza — nothing else would suffice — so his mom resorted to creating pizza-like dishes. Chicken Parm suddenly became “pizza chicken,” and it was finally OK for him to eat. Sound familiar? Trying to feed a picky eater feels like a never-ending, thankless task.

Fruit is like the hole-in-one of my children’s lunch boxes; it is one of the few things my kids are guaranteed to eat every day. (The same cannot be said for green vegetables or even baby carrots.) The pitfall of fruit is that some of its best specimens — summer strawberries, delicate fall pears — take a beating in transportation from backpack to bus stop to school cubby.

Because that first week back to school can be tough!

Being a mother, registered dietitian, and food writer, I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about how best to feed kids. With my own three daughters, I’ve managed certain aspects of feeding them successfully (they’re enthusiastic vegetable eaters) and others less gracefully (I may or may not sometimes trade lollipops for good behavior). Like all aspects of parenting, it took me a while to find my feet in the realm of feeding a family.

Depending on where you are in the country, the new school year is either underway or fast approaching. My own first grader is headed back to school next week. It has been a whole year since I’ve regularly packed her lunch box (she had half-day kindergarten last year), so getting back into our school lunch groove has involved dusting off the lunch bags, shopping for a few new supplies, and talking about school lunch.

We know most kids seem to love sugary foods. What we often don’t know is how to decide how much sugar is too much, whether we should use sugar as a reward, or when we should let our kids indulge in the sugar-laced treats we say are off-limits. Parenting is not an exact science; there’s usually no firm right or wrong answer for child-rearing questions when it comes to food. And sometimes choosing what’s best for your family is a matter of shopping around for ideas.

I’m pretty sure kids have hated vegetables since the beginning of time. One of these days anthropologists will unearth new cave paintings depicting families eating dinner together, and there, between the fire and the spear, will be a pictograph of a kid refusing to try his spinach. That’s the kid mine descended from, at least. I really try not to hate the moms who say, “Oh, vegetables? I just stick anything I can into Sally’s sandwich, and she eats it.

Getting kids to eat veggies is often a challenge. Pasta, rice, and bread are easy, but lots of kids shy away from the more complex — and healthy — stuff. I’ve been lucky with my girls: They mostly eat their vegetables (sometimes even with gusto!). Still, if they had a choice between cheese and crackers or spinach? Yeah, they’re going for the crackers.

Here’s how “mom life” is supposed to work: You get home from long days of (fill in the blank: work, school, play, travel, life), open the fridge, and find an abundance of fruits and vegetables for a perfect nutritious meal. (You’re doing such a good job of planning ahead these days!) The kids play quietly while things come together in about 30 minutes, and someone else takes over the dishes while you have a few minutes to relax before the bedtime routine begins.

How each parent defines a “better lunch” is different. For some, it might mean more healthful food choices (or even just a little weekly variety); for others, it might simply mean something that doesn’t come back home at 3 p.m. Whether you’re looking to get calories in, expand your kids’ palates, or make lunch-making less boring for yourself, there’s always room for new ideas.

While I am generally not a fan of my kids snacking, there are times — like right when they get home from school — when they just want a little something. Immediately. And they don’t care that I’m actively cooking dinner that will be ready in five minutes. So while I’d rather they not snack, I’m also a realist. As long as I can guide them toward something healthy, I know they can feed their growing bellies.