Teach children to eat healthy food without making mealtimes a battleground. Here is some strategic advice for parents in need of inspiration.

Encouraging good eating habits can have a significant impact on your child’s health, assisting them in maintaining a healthy weight, regulating their moods and avoiding many health issues. A nutritious diet can also improve your child’s mental and emotional well-being, reducing the risk of mental and emotional disorders like depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and ADHD.

Children acquire a natural predilection for the foods they enjoy the most, whether they are toddlers or teenagers. The difficulty is to make nutritional choices appealing to foster healthy eating habits.

With these suggestions, you can establish healthy eating habits in your children without turning mealtimes into a struggle, giving them the best chance to develop into strong, well-balanced adults.

Do’s and don’ts: Encouraging good eating habits

Because different types of encouragement will elicit different responses from different children, we’ve given you a list of techniques to help you prevail; but try one or two strategies at a time and see if it works after a few days or weeks before adding or removing more. 

Do’s

• Do set the example you want your child to mimic with your own eating habits. Share mealtimes and eat the same healthy dishes.

• Do discourage snacking on junk foods. Keep a plentiful supply of healthy foods, such as fruit, raw carrots or cheese, which children can eat between meals.

• Do allow children to follow their natural appetites when deciding how much to eat.

• Do encourage children to enjoy fruit and vegetables by giving them different varieties from an early age. Aim for five portions a day.

• Do invite children to help prepare food at home. With so much convenience food available, many children may never learn to enjoy cooking and so rely on ready-made foods.

Don’ts

• Don’t encourage a sweet tooth. If you don’t add unnecessary sugar to drinks and foods, the chances are that children will never miss it.

• Don’t condition children to eat extra salt by sprinkling it over food.

• Don’t give skimmed or semi-skimmed milk to under-fives; they need the energy provided by the extra calories in whole milk.

• Don’t give whole nuts to children under four years old in case they choke. Peanut butter and groundnuts are fine as long as the child is not allergic to them.

• Don’t use lectures about the starving millions to try and persuade children to eat or force them to eat more than they want.

• Don’t make children feel guilty about eating any type of food.

Conclusion

What youngsters eat and drink during their early years can have a long-term impact on their health. Because our children’s eating habits are set throughout their first few years of life, it is critical that we encourage them to eat nutritious foods.