A quick bowl of whole-grain Cheerios or banana slices smeared with peanut butter are two easy solutions for getting kids fed and out the door on school days, but those quick meals come with a catch as the kids grow older: You have to actually get them to sit down to eat it.
Sadly, breakfast skipping among children and adolescents is more prevalent than you might hope. The latest figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show about 14% of kids ages 6-11 and 17% of adolescents ages 12-19 regularly head to class on an empty stomach.
And it only gets worse as they grow older. The CDC found that 75% of teens surveyed in the fall of 2021 said they were not eating breakfast daily, up from 66.9% in 2019.
The plain truth is that kids who eat breakfast do better in school. Studies show that breakfast eaters tend to have higher attendance, are less frequently tardy and experience fewer hunger-induced stomach aches.
“It is very hard to concentrate, retain knowledge and really learn when you are hungry,” says Judy Siebert, a dietitian with West Virginia University’s Medical Weight Management Clinic at J.W. Ruby Memorial Hospital. “The brain only uses glucose for energy, so if that is low, it’s very hard to learn and retain new concepts.”