Childcare centres sending kids home with dinner boxes to help exhausted parents

Childcare centres sending kids home with dinner boxes to help exhausted parents

Family dinner box
If, like me, you find the post-childcare or after-school dinner particularly challenging and therefore often end up resorting to weetbix and peas, you’re going to love this.

One childcare operator is now offering $5 dinner boxes to parents when picking up their kids from their centres.

The initiative comes from Learn and Laugh Children’s Centres, co-founded by Lilach Weininger, who knows firsthand how over-it working parents can be after a long day at work.

Not only is there dinner to make, there are tantrums to manage, baths to organise, homework to do, cleaning up and preparation for the next day to be done. There’s also the desire to actually spend some quality time with your kids.

Add to that the fact many of us can’t just switch off from work in the evenings and may at some point need to log back on — and the chaos turns to exhaustion.

Lilach says their Sydney network of six centres were looking for ways to make the lives of parents easier, and the dinner initiative was an obvious solution.

They’re charging $5 a box, but say a number of families pick up two, collecting freshly cooked food that’s ready to eat immediately when they get home. The service also ensures the kids are eating something different to what they had at lunch.

After offering the service at a number of their centres six months ago (with the remaining to start soon), Lilach estimates around 40% of families are using the service, depending on what meals are on offer. They have also made the shift to reusable containers, to offer a more sustainable service.

While I can’t attest to the taste of the meals, I’m impressed by the idea, and can see a market in it for childcare centres across the country. Especially given the rising number of single parents, as well as the fact 64% of two-parent families nationally now have both parents in the workforce, according to the ABS stats.

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