How To Motivate Your Children To Eat Healthier

2024 Author: Steven Freeman | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 08:15

What mom hasn't heard her son say at the table: 'I don't like that' or 'I don't want it'? Surely almost all of them. However, you should never throw in the towel. This is stated by Mª Carmen Gallego Rodrigo, nurse and pediatric specialist. “Childhood is the best time to establish healthy habits. It is at this stage and in adolescence when the maximum growth occurs, which is why food plays a very important role”.

How to do it is what you have to learn and work as parents and educators. Obesity is the epidemic of the 21st century in most developed countries. To combat it, Gallego makes an invitation: teach our children that eating well will make them feel better. "Prevention is the mainstay to avoid disease," he says flatly.

One way to do this is by involving them in the cooking process. "Children must participate and help in the preparation of lunch, dinner or breakfast. Let them manipulate it and see how each dish is made. This will make them feel motivated when it comes to eating it, "says the expert.

Being creative, especially with foods they don't like, helps them end up accepting them without a problem. For example, many children don't tolerate boiled cauliflower, so let's try looking for a funnier angle. "You can make it with beaten egg as if it were an omelette," continues Gallego, who also encourages presentations of dishes with face shapes and drawings that will stimulate them.

Another tactic that works is to give them smaller amounts, especially of those foods for which they feel rejection. "That is something we do in the dining room of our school, the amounts are not abundant so that the child who wants to repeat, repeat, and the one who is given little to eat can take all or almost everything," says the also school nurse.

The environment around them at mealtime is also essential. Food is sacred and requires our attention, so no television, cell phones, or consoles. "It must be a moment of family coexistence that favors imitation learning," Gallego stresses. The example of parents will be the best lesson for their children.

We know that your favorite dishes are pizza and hamburgers and you do not have to remove it from the menu. It is about varying, alternating and making deals with them. "If I put fish or vegetables one night, at noon the next day they will have something that they really like," he continues.

In reality, it all comes down to motivating and encouraging them, with discipline but without yelling or punishing. Take them shopping with you, involve them in this process and choose food one day a week. Let's not settle for giving them snacks full of sugar because it's the easy way and let's enjoy eating a piece of fruit together. That acquired responsibility, according to Gallego, will open his mind to other foods.

Shopping together

Very important: drink water. In the process of feeding a child it fulfills an essential function, according to Gallego. "There is evidence that providing water to children and that they have good hydration can help them perform better on standardized tests of concentration, short-term memory and other essential elements of the learning process." So let's include it in your daily routines, like brushing your teeth and tidying up toys.

Let's see this whole process as a challenge to help our children, not as a burden. The good results will not be long in coming and the satisfaction will be enormous. "The healthy eating of a child is an educational and constant process where parents are the fundamental pillar to create that habit", Gallego insists. It's worth a try!