Nutrition 101

The importance of teaching your children healthy eating habits.

I don’t want carrots! I want an ice cream sandwich for supper!” Many a parent has heard that or something similar thrown at them around dinnertime each evening. Children love to test parental boundaries and mealtimes are nearly always a battleground, unless you have a particularly healthy eater.

The idea of teaching a very young child healthy food choices may seem a daunting task, but it’s an important step in preparing them for making lifelong food choices. If they’ve been eating properly for as long as they can remember, it’s a habit that becomes ingrained and will hopefully be carried over throughout their lives.

You can begin your child on the road to healthy eating as young as six months of age. That’s about the time they should be starting to eat solid foods, moving beyond just breast milk or formula to some other form of sustenance–usually pureed veggies and fruits.

Even before that though, your child is making a choice about eating whether they realize it or not. They’re deciding on their own whether or not they eat, and how much. A nursing child will turn their head from breast milk or a bottle when they’re full, without consciously realizing they’re doing so, making the choice that they’ve had enough.

As children get older, parents can offer different choices. The choice should never be if they want to eat or not, but rather something about what they want to eat. As babies become toddlers, they like the idea of getting to decide things for themselves, but you have to make sure you’re giving them the right choices to pick from.

Colleen Rand, Regional Manager of Community Nutrition for the WRHA, offers an example of something you might ask a two-year-old: “’Do you want to wear your red shirt or your green shirt?,’ not ‘Do you want to get dressed?’”

Since a toddler’s favourite word is typically “no”, the question should never be one requiring a yes or no answer. Try asking them if they want an apple or banana, or cucumber slices or some avocado–that way they’re still getting to decide, but you’ll both be happy with either decision.

There are children though, that are just picky eaters. You may wonder how they even have energy to function, because it seems like their food intake is very little, but unless there is an obvious reason, you shouldn’t worry about how much your child is eating.

“The best indicator or whether a child is eating enough is whether or not they’re growing. We all need different amounts of food. As long as they’re growing along a predictable curve, we don’t worry about how much they eat,” says Rand.

The thing is, when a child is hungry, they will eat. Like adults, they don’t all require the same amount of food to keep them energized. So while you may think a handful of carrot sticks, a cheese stick and one meatball isn’t enough, your two-year-old might be stuffed. “It’s very important not to force children to eat. It’s not a battle of wills,” says Rand.

The truth is that forcing a child to eat more food than they want, or even to finish what they have on their plate is a thing of the past. In truth, forcing more food into a child can lead to eating disorders later in life. Those children can fail to notice the cues that let them know when they’re satiated, because of years of having to eat beyond that point.

So if you have a child that’s picky or flat out doesn’t like veggies or other nutritious foods, should you sneak them into their diet? Pureeing veggies and fruits and mixing them into other foods is one thing–it’s something they may even know about.

However, if you make spaghetti sauce which includes onions, and your child doesn’t like onions, don’t tell them there are no onions in it. Chances are that they’ll find a tiny sliver, call your bluff, and then they may be leery to trust you after that.

The best thing you can do is be honest. Tell them that yes, it does have onions in it, but that they should try it anyway. Let them know that there are other things in the sauce that they do like.

Rand says that studies show some foods need to be offered up to 40 times before a child will like them. Their pallets are growing and changing all the time. She suggests saying something along the lines of “This is food you don’t know that you like yet,” when you introduce your child to something new.

There are some basic common sense tips to encourage your child to develop healthy eating habits:

1) Don’t allow constant grazing throughout the day. While it’s easy to give your child snacks whenever they claim to be hungry, this almost guarantees that when it’s time to sit down for a meal, they won’t have room in their tummies for anything else.

2) Don’t offer fluids before the meal. This just makes it more likely your child will chug down all their chocolate milk before dinner is served, leaving their tummies sloshing and very full feeling.

3) Don’t offer snacks for an hour to an hour and a half before a meal. This will ensure that your child is hungry and more receptive to eat what is being served at the table.

Another way to get children involved in making healthy food choices is to teach them why eating healthy is so important. Kids are always more agreeable when they understand.

“Connecting what we put into our bodies with how healthy we feel is something to teach right from very young. We talk about how food fuels our bodies to enable us to do the things we love to do like running, swimming and playing with our friends. Healthy food choices lead to healthy bodies which allows us to do what we like,” says Maria Abiusi of The Food Studio.

As your child gets older, another great way to get them involved and excited about being involved with meals and healthy decisions is helping with preparations. When they’re fairly small, you can ask them to set the table. Even if they take the plates, glasses and cutlery to the table one by one, they get to feel like they’re contributing.

When they’re old enough to be able to handle knives safely, ask them to slice up cheese for burgers, or to rip up the lettuce to make a big salad.

At The Food Studio kids learn even more about making smart food decisions. “They learn to make healthy, economical and tasty meals from scratch; they learn to be adventurous and confident in the kitchen; and they learn the various aspects of being safe in the kitchen,” says Abiusi.

The Food Studio offers a camp for kids aged 8 to 15, working in groups based on age and skill level. It’s three, week-long sessions: July 18–22; August 2–5; August 15–19, where they focus on developing safe food handling and knife skills along with lots of hands-on baking and cooking experiences. They also offer some kids programming during the regular programming season from September to June.

One of the most effective methods of teaching your child healthy eating habits is probably the easiest–model the behavior you want them to display. Says Rand, “Your actions will speak louder than anything you say to them.”

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