Building Good Eating Habits for Children's Health

What you teach your kids can play a key role in ensuring that your child makes good choices for healthy snacks and meals in the future.

Healthy eating habits are often established at a very young age. Parents, Grandparents or Caregivers play the role on influencing what kind of eater a child becomes. But setting up a child with a lifelong commitment to healthy eating doesn’t have to mean spending hours teaching your child about nutrition.

Children’s Health: Setting the Right Example

The great news is that you can incorporate healthy snacks and meals into your daily life with just a few simple strategies.

Start early. Even before your child takes his first bite of solid food, you can establish taste preferences. Start early in infancy and each day, with each meal choice, show kids that eating healthy is just a way of life! Research has found that breastfeeding can be the foundation for developing nutritious habits. Infants have a taste for sweet and salty things. If they’re given sugary drinks and other unhealthy foods early on, they’ll be more prone to obesity later in life.

Offer nutritious choices and variety. Try offering a variety of fruits and vegetables. It’s very important to introduce a wide selection of healthy snacks and meals to your young child. If they’re continually exposed to healthy choices, they are likely to eventually incorporate them into their diets and will begin to make better choices when they are away from home.

Don’t give up if the food is rejected. Even if your child rejects healthy foods, repeated exposure will encourage a child to eventually incorporate them into his or her routine. It usually takes 3-4 times of trying a new food before accepting it. Try giving your child a vegetable on her plate at lunch and dinner every day! If your child refuses to eat a certain food, don’t just give up and stop offering it, keep offering it and keep trying everyday, and if they don’t eat it, you can! Remember you are setting the example here.

Turn off the TV. Strange as it sounds, one way to get your child to eat their veggies may be to turn off the TV. A recent study found that adolescent children who ate meals in front of the television without their families consumed significantly fewer vegetables, grains, and calcium-rich foods and had higher intakes of sugary sodas, compared to children who did not watch TV during meals. Notably, however, the children who had family meals in front of the TV were found to eat more healthfully than those who didn’t have regular family meals at all.

Practice what you preach. Children’s lifetime habits come largely from the daily choices they see their parents make. What we learn and our exposed to on a daily basis is from our environment! Overweight parents who live on fast food can't really expect to have slim, healthy kids. Your children watch every move you make and if it’s ok for you why is it not ok for them? Begin by eating healthily in front of your kids, and if you must have ice cream wait until the kids go to bed or set a special date with your children to have it together. Both of you will appreciate and enjoy having a special treat if a plan is made together instead of indulging daily.

Healthy Snacks and Sugary Treats: The Right Approach
Unhealthy foods, such as those high in sugar and fat, are often used as “reward” foods for children who have completed their homework or cleaned their rooms. Leave these foods for special occasions instead of rewards. Of course some foods are unhealthy than others, but all foods can fit into a healthy diet. Foods that are high in sugar and fat, such as brownies, cake, and chips¬, are foods should be left to enjoy occasionally!

Educate your children on the appropriate serving size for the sugary foods, and demonstrate that pigging out is never an option. Explain and show them by eating healthy foods each day means it’s ok to go out for ice cream on Friday night-just be mindful of how much ice cream you are eating! You want to teach your children how to make good decisions from what's right and what's wrong, so remember to include a healthy lifestyle into that education.