Four efective tips for making your child's diet healthy
Photo: How to teach a child to eat well (freepik.com)
How to ensure that your child's diet is not harmful to their body? How to instill healthy eating habits from a young age? This question is answered by the Ukrainian coach and nutritionist Viktor Mandziak.
How to teach your child to eat properly?
Parents are responsible for ensuring their children develop good eating habits that will impact their health in adulthood. However, children often choose calorie-rich foods that provide quick satisfaction. How can you teach your child to love healthy food? Here are a few practical tips to help establish healthy eating habits from an early age.
Combine the desirable with the healthy
To help a child love healthy food, pair it with dishes they already enjoy. For example, if your child likes steamed cutlets, add tomatoes to them, or if they love stew, offer it with buckwheat. This approach allows the child to enjoy tasty food while also introducing them to healthy ingredients. Tasty and healthy foods must be served on the plate within 9 seconds of each other so the brain doesn’t focus solely on one dish.
Combine the desirable with calories
Caloric food provides instant satisfaction, and this can be used effectively. If, alongside healthy food, your child immediately gets a tasty dish high in calories (such as honey with oatmeal or cottage cheese with jam), their body will associate this food with positive feelings, helping them to enjoy it.
Combine food with fun
Creating positive associations with food is also an effective way to change eating habits. Children love to play, so you can make mealtimes interactive: for example, cut vegetables into fun shapes or have a battle between cucumbers and carrots, allowing the child to choose the winner. This interactivity creates an association: vegetables = fun, and the child will want to repeat the experience.
Combine the desirable with hunger
Hunger is the best seasoning for food, and this rule works for children too. If a child is not eating impulsively but is genuinely hungry, they will find food more enjoyable, even if it's something they don't usually like. Therefore, it's useful to let them get a bit hungry before offering them new or unfamiliar dishes. Over time, the child will get used to healthy food and may even come to love it.
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