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How to teach kids to eat healthy
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"Yuck! Green Beans and chicken for dinner!" Parent's hear words like these all the time and meal time can be a battlefield of negotiations and threats like "no dessert or snacks if you don't eat your chicken and green beans". How do parent's show kids that they need to eat a certain amount of different kinds of foods each day? One of the main causes for obesity is simply poor decision making and not paying attention to what is being put into the body.
Because junk food is a part of our children's world and is going to be offered at parties, restaurants, relatives households, etc it is important to teach kids about healthy choices and to think about what he/she has eaten for the day and if the choice that he/she is making is a smart choice. Mypyramid.gov is an excellent resource for healthy eating and offers an eating journal that allows parent's to track individual food intake and to monitor how an individual is doing for the day or the week as far eating good nutritious food.
It is important to include children in decision making and using meal time and snack time for teaching kids what is being eaten and what food group each food falls into. For example, for a dinner of grilled chicken, green beans, long grain rice, and peaches ask the kids what food group chicken is in and make it multiple choice. "Is chicken a meat, vegetable, or fruit?" "Are green beans a vegetable or a fruit?" Make each person a chart and check every time a food is eaten from a certain food group so kids and parents have a visual as to what has been consumed for the day.
When a child asks for cookies and milk for an afternoon snack simply ask, "what food group does that fall into?" Have the child look at his food chart to see how what he has eaten for the day. If the child hasn't eaten any fruit for the day then say to the child, "you haven't eaten any fruit today, a better choice would be peanut butter apples and milk." If the child is doing well and has eaten from every food group, then a few cookies would be a nice treat.
Including kids in decision making and teaching kids thoughtful eating is a good habit to get into and will give your kids a sense of control about what is being eaten and a sense of accomplishment when he meets his requirements for the day. Most importantly it teaches healthy eating in childhood that will carry over into adulthood.
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