Kids and food

You may notice your children eating foods that you would prefer they didn’t. But how do you navigate this without creating negative beliefs around food?

We learn about food from an early age, so the way we teach our kids to eat and nourish their bodies will have a profound, flow-on effect for their own children.

We can see this in our own relationship with food. It was informed by a number of things, from what our parents served us to how food was eaten and what constituted a snack food. From indirect experiences, we learned how we should behave around food – for example what ‘adults’ eat and what ‘children’ eat – and we even learned from the expectations our parents had around dinner times. What we understood from all this observation, including our observations of the world around us (plus our experiences), is not necessarily true – they are beliefs about food. And beliefs can be changed.

In saying this, you may feel like this is now a bit of a communication minefield; for instance, you may notice that your children enjoy a lot of foods that you would rather they didn’t eat, but also be aware that you don’t want to make foods ‘good’ or ‘bad’.

So, here are a few easy tips to help your children develop a good relationship with food, including embracing nutritious foods.

Don’t cut – add

Rather than cutting out the things they enjoy, you might first focus on adding more wholefoods into their diet. Wholefoods are those items that either don’t need a food label (for example, veges and fruit) or only have one to two ingredients added if they are out of a packet, like rice cakes, peanut butter and raw nuts. Introducing and eating more wholefoods will improve your little one’s nutrition and see them start to choose those items more as they grow up.

SNACK IDEAS

• Try adding some cucumber sticks and cherry tomatoes or a bliss ball to the morning snack container.

• Add a few leaves of shredded baby spinach to a cheese sandwich or mix spinach into mashed egg and mayonnaise sandwiches, with some carrot sticks alongside it.

• Swap high-sugar cereals for porridge – a warm breakfast in cooler months is a wonderful way to begin their day. Opt for plain rolled oats made in water and then add your own twist, such as fresh fruit (like grated apple), freeze-dried strawberries or cinnamon.

• Swap out low fat/sweetened yoghurt for natural Greek yoghurt or coconut yoghurt. You can make your own flavours to add – for example, by melting frozen mixed berries in a pot until broken down and syrupy. If there are strawberries in the mix it should be sweet already, but if it does need to be sweetened slightly you can add honey. Store in the fridge and add to natural yoghurt for a snack.

• Add some fresh fruit and natural yoghurt to their porridge or top their morning toast with scrambled eggs instead of a spread.

• Make a nutritious smoothie for an after-school snack. Try putting banana, frozen berries, coconut milk and half a courgette into a blender and pulse until smooth – they won’t even realise you’ve added courgette to it!

• Add lots of veges to your Bolognese sauce.

• Swap out bought frozen fries, which can include cheaper inflammatory oils and other additives, and make your own using waxy potatoes and adding chopped rosemary or chicken salt.