Meal Planning for Families

What Meal Planning for Families Really Looks Like

The typical family eats 3 meals a day, plus 2-4 snacks (let’s say 3 for our math here). That means in one week 42 meals/snacks are prepared and eaten AND well over 42 hours are spent preparing and cleaning up that food! So what if I told you that you could do all that in 5 hours… on one day a week? Let me tell you what meal planning REALLY looks like. Meal planning looks like reducing the time, money, and energy spent preparing all that food. It looks like freeing up your brain power, decision making, time, evenings etc.. to spend time with your family, and make memories with your kids.

Let’s just keep going with that sentiment… it looks like an evening at the park and its OK that you are there until 6PM! Dinner is already made and will reheat in the microwave in 2 minutes. It looks like waking up in the morning and enjoying morning snuggles WITHOUT immediately thinking about what to make for the toddler before he loses all reasoning power due to extreme morning hunger. (can you tell this is a lived experience?

You get the idea right? Plan and prepare your meals and free up an insane amount of time. Trust me. It is worth it! AND I am here to do most of the hard work for you!

The Benefits of Meal Planning for Families (That Moms Actually Feel)

Let’s reiterate some of the benefits that I mentioned above and then add a few more!

• Less decision fatigue
• More peaceful evenings
• Better toddler behavior at mealtimes
• Lower grocery costs

Less decision fatigue

42 meals a week means at least 42 decisions a week too. Breakfast decisions are hard because you are tired, lunches and snacks because they need to fit the activities of the day, and dinner because evenings get full and everyone is tired… and mom doesn’t really want to spend hours in the kitchen EVERY night…

So how to remove some of the decisions? Automate them. Planning a cuisine rotation that correlates with the days of the week for example. Then you have a recipe bank for each cuisine/category. Make a weekly menu so all the meals are decided in advance.

More peaceful evenings

I find one of the most stressful parts of the evening to be the meal prep and clean up. One of the BEST parts of meal planning and prepping is that you have no dishes from cooking the meal. Meaning you are left with a simple, clear the table and load the dishwasher kind of night. Leaves time to play a game as a family after dinner instead of kitchen cleanup.

Before dinner even happens you remove the stress of an on time dinner and deciding what to make! If that isn’t every mothers dream… I don’t know what is.

Better toddler behavior at mealtimes

Less stress means happier kids. They read the room those little ones. Meal prepping for your family also helps contribute to an overall peaceful environment at meal time. A dinner for a toddler with a mom who is feeling calm instead of at the end of her rope means they wont (or are less likely to) act out because of the stress they feel. They wont be rushed because dinner wont be late.. you get the idea. The home feels more peaceful, everyone eats better.

I also love that when you meal plan, you can think ahead on what foods to make sure to have that the babies and toddlers will be able to eat well. Nothing is more frustrating than spending all kinds of time on a dinner to learn that the flavor profile is to mature or the textures are too hard to chew… oops.

Lower grocery costs

Planning your meals allows you to bulk buy. This saves money. Prepping your meals means you can freeze things for later. Less waste and therefore saving money. When you go to the grocery store with a shopping list that is made alongside a planned menu, you wont buy more than you need, or leave off half the list and have to go back to the store again later so you can make a full recipe. A plan saves you money. Plain and simple.

Like I said, you can also buy in bulk. This means you buy chicken at the cheepest price per ounce. Beef. Cheese… all of it. And then you actually use it up! You make all of your chicken meals for the MONTH in the first week and just leave most of them frozen. Same goes for on sale veggies or fruits. Bulk prepping gives you a chance to shop at the lowest price available without having to eat the same meal for a week straight to use it all up.

How to Start Meal Planning for Families (Even If You’re Busy)

• Choose your planning style (weekly, bi‑weekly, batch prep)
• Pick 5 core meals
• Use toddler‑friendly staples
• Build a simple rotation

Choose your planning style

There are a few different ways to plan your meals. Some people will do a weekly menu. Sit down at the end of one week and plan what to eat each day of the next. Then you make a shipping list based on that meal plan and voila!

You can also plan out a month with supplemental shopping trips (to pick up fresh fruits and veggies that wont last that long). Then you batch prep 30 dinners, breakfasts and lunch ideas to grab and go for several weeks.

Then of course the middle ground of those two. Plan a menu for a couple weeks and bulk prep and freeze a few meals that carry over as future options.

I encourage you to try out some planning styles until you find one that works for you. You are looking for something that reduces stress, and leaves you feeling prepared and on top of things. It may take a few rounds to feel like you get the hang of it! But don’t worry, I am going to give you a couple weeks worth of the work completely done for you (for FREE!) while you learn your system.

Pick 5 core meals

Having 5 core meals you can fall back on is a must. These are not the EXACT same meal very week. It’s a meal template that you can grab and go with for 5 nights out of every week.

• Sheet pan baked meat and veggies
• Rice meal
• Taco flavor meal
• Pasta Meal
• Bread or soup meal (seasonal adjustments needed here)

Now when you go to plan your week you just plug this meal structure in and then pick how you will fill the template this time. Chicken and veggies, Korean beef on rice, tacos, spaghetti, and bread bowls with potato soup. Done and done. See how easy it is to feel like you have variety AND structure?

Use toddler‑friendly staples

Another must when you have little kids is to include toddler friendly staples so you know they are going to be able to eat the same food as everyone else. For example, a veggie that cooks soft enough for the to eat. When meal planning for a family you want to make sure that the whole family can eat MOST of what is planned. No individual eating plans here. The goal is simple so lets make it so! Here are some of my favorite food groups/types to include in every meal for those toddlers:

• Bread or soft grain (pasta, tortilla, oats, pancake etc…)
• Soft cooked veggie
• Soft fruit
• Protein they can eat (if meat then ground or cut very small for them)

Build a simple rotation

Honestly if you want to make things really simple…. You do a rotation.

Breakfast rotates on the week:

• Monday – Oats or hot cereal
• Tuesday – Pancakes
• Wednesday – Eggs and Toast
• Thursday – Granola and Yogurt
• Friday – Eggs and Hashbrowns
• Saturday – Bagels
• Sunday – Breakfast Casserole or Burritos

Then lunch at my house is almost always either leftovers OR sandwiches. I like to keep things on hand for Tuna, PBJ, or Meat and Cheese.

Dinner rotations are best done on a monthly or biweekly… so you will need about 15 – 30 dinners you like. Then you just rotate meal plans. Same meals for the first week of every month, then week two, then week three and four and you start back at one again the next month. You can switch things out here and there to suit your fancy, but the basic plan and the shopping lists are the same month to month. SIMPLE!

Family Meal Prep Tips That Save Hours Every Week

Hours. Hours back in your week mom! Does that sound glorious? What would you do with even 1-2 extra hours a week… so many things! So here are 3 ways you can get those hours back.

One Hour Meal Prep Method

This does not mean that you spend an hour each meal prepping food. It means you prep MOST of your meals for the whole week in one hour. The goal is NOT to cook full meals — it’s to prep the building blocks that make meals fast all week.

You spend one focused hour prepping ingredients that make the rest of the week easier. Think: chopping, cooking basics, portioning, freezing.

How it works (step‑by‑step)

• Choose 5 building‑block foods — proteins, veggies, carbs, toddler staples
• Prep ingredients, not meals — cook chicken, roast veggies, wash fruit
• Use multitasking — oven + stovetop + cutting board at the same time
• Store in grab‑and‑go containers — fridge for 3 days, freezer for longer
• Build meals in minutes all week — mix and match

Here is an example of what I do in my meal prep hour:

• Throw a meat in the crockpot
  • I make shredded chicken of some flavor and then freeze what I don’t need for that weeks meals.
• Cok a pot of rice on the stove
  • This freezes really well and reheats in just a few minutes from the quart size bags I portion it into.
• Wash and cut bell peppers, carrots, cucumbers, strawberries, blueberries, grapes, onions (freeze)
  • The fresh fruits and veggies I pull out for snacks and meals all week. I love setting them out on the counter and we just munch on healthy yummies all throughout the day!
• Cook Ground Turkey for the weeks recipes
  • Taco meat, Asian flavors, some aside for spaghetti sauce or beefy rice. Freezing cooked meat saves a LOT of time when mealtime comes around.
• Make one recipe my toddler will eat for sure… beef and seashell, broccoli, pancakes, rice and beef (see below for more details on that one)

Batch Cook Toddler Favorites

SOOOO good to have some on hand items for hungry little tummies with no patience.

When I do my hour meal prep on Sunday nights I make one dish I know my toddler will eat. Then I portion this out into muffin tins and freeze it. Then pull the frozen pucks out and store them in a freezer bag. Super easy to pull out a frozen puck of food and reheat when needed.

My toddler LOVES pancakes. We basically eat them every morning. So about once a month I make a HUGE batch of pancakes and freeze them. They reheat in 30 seconds later on.

Snacks… ohhh pre-prepared snacks are an entire industry of consumerism. I buy snacks all the time too. When I decide to, meal prepping some snacks is an awesome way to have things on hand you feel good about putting into your children (and making your own ALWAYS costs less).

• Filling my refillable squeeze pouches with applesauce and yogurt
• Granola bars
• Cheeze it crackers
• Bagels
• Cut fruit and veggies
• Breakfast Cookies

Freeze First Strategy

Instead of cooking everything now, you dump all the ingredients into a bag or casserole dish to cook later. Then it tastes fresh when you eat it! I LOVE doing this for oven meals and crockpot meals. You can make a LOT of food in very little time if you are just assembling things and not cooking things. Here are some of my favorites:

• Angel Chicken
• Taco Soup
• BBQ Chicken
• Roast and Veggies
• Chicken Rice Casserole
• Sweet and Sour Meatballs

I have a ton more of these in my meal prep resources, and on my pinterest board for crockpot freezer meals. The freeze and dump cooking is SO nice for meal prepping quickly and then eating really well all week.

So where do you start?

Are you convinced yet that this is the BEST! You will save so much time and energy when you take the meal prep stress out of every day. I still cook during the week, but when I do it is because I want to, not because I must. Which makes it all the more enjoyable. So to summarize:

• Choose your planning style
• Pick your meals
• Go shopping
• Get prepping

Grab my 5-Day Family Meal Prep Starter Plan to try this out and see how you like meal planning!

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