For a few months, my daughter’s lunchbox came home basically untouched. The sandwich with one bite taken out of it. The fruit cup still sealed. I’d open it at 3pm and feel like I’d failed some test nobody told me I was taking.

Meanwhile she ate fine at home. Dinner, breakfast, weekends — normal. Just school lunch, sitting in her bag, going to waste while I spiraled about whether she was starving at her desk.

Here’s what I eventually figured out, with some help from a pediatric occupational therapist named Dr. Lauren Hershfield, who talked about exactly this in a UBC News interview. Her take basically gave me permission to stop making lunch harder than it needed to be.

First: cut the crusts. Seriously. If she’ll eat the sandwich without the crust and won’t touch it with the crust, cut the crust. Peel the apple skin. Whatever gets lunch eaten. As Hershfield puts it, “the priority is making sure they’re getting enough energy to learn and play.” The nutrition purism can wait — you can leave a little more crust on later, gradually, as she gets more comfortable. Lunch is not the hill to die on.

Second: she wasn’t eating because school lunch isn’t eating. It’s a twelve-minute window between math and the playground, with a hundred other kids, weird smells, and every container in the world fighting back. Of course she wasn’t sitting down to savor her meal. She’s five. The playground is right there.

That one reframed everything for me. I stopped trying to make lunch carry the whole day. Bigger breakfast. A real snack right after school. The lunchbox just had to do its part, not all of it. Thinking across the whole day instead of staring at one full container took the panic out of 3pm.

Third, and this was the one that actually moved the needle: I let her pack it. Not the whole thing — she’s not running a catering business — but age-matched pieces. Pick: apples or strawberries? Pack your own snack bag. Spread your own butter, kid. The same thing I learned with cooking at home held true here — the ownership changes it. She’ll eat a sandwich she assembled with her own clumsy hands. Hershfield says getting kids involved in preparing and packing their lunch helps them get comfortable with different foods and textures, and yeah, that checks out in our kitchen.

We also started packing the way she recommends: stuff I know she’ll eat, plus one thing she’s unsure about. The reliable food means she gets energy no matter what. The new thing just sits there as an option. Nobody mentions it. Nobody negotiates with it. Sometimes it comes home. Sometimes she licks it and makes a face. That’s the whole game.

Two small practical things that helped more than they should have: we practiced opening the containers at home. Sounds ridiculous. It wasn’t. Half her lunch period was being spent fighting with a lid, and then there was no time left. And we talked through what lunchtime actually looks like before school started — where she sits, when she eats, what’s supposed to happen. For a kid who finds unfamiliar environments overwhelming, that rehearsal mattered.

One more thing from the interview that I want to say plainly: there’s a line between a picky phase and something that needs support. If mealtimes are consistently miserable, or the pickiness is starting to run her life — she can’t do birthday parties, can’t eat at a friend’s house — that’s worth bringing up with someone who does this for a living. And if it’s running YOUR life, if you’re lying awake cataloging what she ate like I was, that counts too. Your stress is part of the picture, not a side note.

So the lunchbox comes home mostly empty now. Not because I cracked some code — because I stopped trying to win lunch and started making it easy instead. Cut crusts. Big breakfast. Let her pack the apple. Practice the container. The rest is just a kid with one eye on the playground, which is exactly where her head should be.