20 ways to teach your child to eat healthy

Author: Svetlana Strelnikova

“I don’t want to have porridge! I don’t want to eat a soup! I won’t eat your salad!” - It seems that any mother is familiar with the cooking tortures of making tasty and healthy food. Hence, the question is: what should you do if your child stubbornly refuses to eat by the canons of a healthy lifestyle?

The two problems that usually occur with children are:

they don’t want to eat fruits and vegetables preferring candy, sandwiches and fast-food.

when getting closer to adolescence children (especially girls) do abruptly restrict their diet thinking that they are too fat.

Not only will you need love, care and attention, but also inventiveness, cunning, good acting, sense of humour, patience and...personal example to teach your children to eat healthy!

Indeed! Even if you have to completely change the whole family’s meal planning, believe us, it won’t hurt anyone! Getting used to a healthy food is the best that can stay with your children for the rest of their life.

Harvard Medical School conducted a research and proved that family meals with children are vital. 70% of families spend no more than 8 minutes eating together. Moreover, everyone keeps looking at their cell phones or reading newspapers whilst eating! The families who spend about 15 minutes on mealtime usually have much healthier, stronger, slimmer and more confident kids! As a matter of fact, warmer relations, very close family ties and common tendency to succeed in life have been observed in the families with an average of 18.4 minute-duration of a lunch or dinner. Those people differed by a more active way of life and hardly suffered from obesity. In like manner, more attention was paid to the health of the whole family members. Therefore, a little difference in only 4 minutes turns out to be very crucial!

Habits, including the eating ones, are laid in the early childhood of a person until he turns 5. Toddlers tend to be very active in copying their parents’ behaviour. That’s why it is important to become a positive role model for your child by eating plenty of fruits and vegetables yourself!

Did you know that the most of the advertising budget of fast-food manufacturers is directed to the children’s audience? Only in 2012, more than $1 billion was spent to attract the audience from 2 to 17 years. Almost 80% of the advertising is transmitted on such top kids’ TV channels as Cartoon Network (32.3%), Nickelodeon (18.3%), Disney XD (16.2%) и Nicktoons (12.4%). These data suggest that whilst you are a strong supporter of a healthy lifestyle, your kid can still receive completely different information associated in his mind with the favourite cartoon characters and the pleasure of watching commercials. Your job as a parent is to necessarily discuss with your kid everything he watches on TV, and what he thinks of these products. Talk to him in an apprehensible and appropriate manner so he could feel that his own opinion about the nutrition of his marvellous heroes - Spiderman, Superman, Batman, and SpongeBob - is important to you. If your child is too small, you can still find some cartoons and fairytales about healthy food. There can be no doubt; it’s in your powers to neutralize the negative impact of fast-food advertising products. Also, it’s not that hard for you to find something similar in the internet. By the same token, lots of interesting cartoons about healthy food can be found on Youtube as well.

20% of all signs on restaurants and cafes of quick service are made in accordance with children’s perceptions. Therefore, if you happen to see such an advertisement while walking with your kid - talk about it, discuss it, and tell your child some good and bad facts about nutrition. Do not use didactic tone or the form of notations. Let you both have a real discussion, debate or a dialogue on equal footing.

Make the washed and chopped fruits and vegetables readily available. First, put them on the table next to the candy and cookies, and then gradually reduce the portion of candy and cookies, and, in its turn, increase the servings of fruits and vegetables.

You can easily decorate a schoolboy’s dessert by adding fruits in it. Additionally, you’d better not to comment, in case he pushes them aside. Just keep doing it in a slow and unconstrained manner.

Offer a child to take some fruits with him to school (banana, apple, etc.). Even if he refuses, you should still give it to him. Tell him he might need it, just in case. He might treat his friend with it. Who knows, perhaps, seeing his friend eating a pear would make him hungry too.

Do not argue with your child if he refuses to eat a hot lunch in favour of sandwiches, chips or candy. Put on the table the food that he wants, and the food that you consider healthy next to it. Whatever he chooses, do not comment, stay calm and neutral.

Never impose conditions like “dessert after salad”! Otherwise, the salad will become an obstacle between the child and the coveted dessert and will be perceived negatively.

It happens that the kid having returned from school prefers a sandwich or junk food just because of being “too lazy” to heat a normal food. That’s why you should ease their task if possible. Put a portion of a soup in a plate or a separate saucepan so that the child could simply put it in the microwave and heat it up. I used to do it for my daughter, and, later, when she became a college student she almost always cooked herself hot meals. All the same, she does try to take a normal full meal to work, instead of sandwiches. And now I understand that everything gets possible if there is an aim. At one time, before the summer’s heat, I’ve got an idea to buy my daughter a cooler bag to carry homemade food with her. That allowed her not to eat in the cafe or snack junk food.

Since you’ve decided to “improve” your nutrition, necessarily discuss it with the kid, no matter how old he is! Even a 3-year-old baby can be explained which food is good for him and which is not, and that you will slightly change the diet in your family clearly explaining the reasons for that. Become a role model by saying you also want to be healthy, slim, vigorous, and willing to cook tasty and varied dishes. Promise your child to keep on buying and cooking his favourite food. Even a 3-year-old chubby little boy and older kids will be interested to help to compile a list of products, go shopping with you, discuss the quality and labels of the products. If the child already knows how to read, pretend you cannot read the ingredients on a jar and ask for help, and then discuss the information. For example, the yogurt jar has a label “flavor identical to natural” on it. That’s a good reason to put it aside and look for some other yogurt with natural fruits. It doesn’t matter if you find it or not in the end, because the point is that you will establish a good dialogue between you and your child, and that’s a good way to go.

While buying fruits and vegetables try to ask your child which one is better in order to catch his attention even if he doesn’t like them. Usually children can get so excited whilst shopping that they will become extremely interested in trying everything they bought together with you.

If you see your child reaching out his hand to the jar, ask him, on equal footing, whether he really wants to buy it or not. If the answer is “yes” - just buy it! And when you get home, try it together, discuss the taste and ingredients. You can do the same even with toddlers!

If your teenager is sitting at the computer all day - put some fruits, nuts, or tea on his desk and he will automatically eat it all together with chips and cola.

Vegetable puree soups are good because they are not perceived as “vegetables”.

Next to your child put the fruits nicely in a vase on the table. Let him try to pick them up by color and choose the best position.

If your child has obesity, you should pay close attention to his behaviour and mood. Does he have a lot of friends? How does he communicate with them? Discuss with him the problems of overweight and ask him what he thinks of himself. Teens tend to be dissatisfied with their appearance not because of extra pounds they gain, but because of something that is objectively related to the structure of their body. It will also be useful to explain that the structure of the body and appearance are affected by genes, the degree of muscle development, and clothing style. Help your son or daughter to choose the best possible option for clothing and physical activity. If the child’s physique is determined by the genes and does not appeal to him, you can provide good examples by the older family members who managed to succeed in life and achieve happiness regardless of the size of the clothes they wear.

In their early childhood kids are very active in physical terms. Actually, such phrases as “Sit here, stay calm!”, “Don’t run!” ruin and spoil everything. Therefore, you should welcome and appreciate any physical activity of your kids and maintain interest in it by playing with them outdoors, and allow them to go in for sports or dancing. Provide them a choice. Let them try anything new until they find something they like, because the most important thing is to have fun and, at the same time, be in need of physical activity.
A wide variety of studies show that energetic and active children eat simple and healthy food. This is due to the more balanced chemical processes that these children have.

It makes no sense to make call-downs, and comment, limit your overweight child’s diet if he wants to eat more cakes or candy. This will only irritate him and low his self-esteem. In addition, the child will be very likely to switch to the “secret” diet and eat “forbidden” food in secret from you. It is very daunting to see him doing that and stay silent. However, in order to solve the problems once and for all, you’ll have to search for other ways. For instance, pretend you accidently forgot to buy candy and offer him an alternative of dried fruits, nuts or juice.

Sometimes children, especially teenagers, think they are overweight, which is often a fault assumption, because of the commercials and advertising that are guilty for it. Hence, they refuse to eat, switch to green lettuce and tea. In such a situation it is extremely important to talk to them in order to let them open up and voice their problem. Help your children arrange the best meal plan.

The first thing a teenager should ask himself is “Am I hungry?” “Am I full?”. The question is tricky because the psychological setting can make your child think he is full. Therefore, ask him: What do you feel in your stomach? Lightness? Void? Fullness?”. It is important to realize, that physical sensations are easier to evaluate. This can be explained by the fact, that when you feel lightness or void, that serves a signal to go eat something. With this in mind, teach your child to listen to the signals of the body! In this case, protein, fat, carbohydrates and calories are secondary.

According to one book on parenting, all the children do need the same approach – the individual one! Therefore, I sincerely wish you to have a creative approach to your children and nutrition, patience and success!

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