Nutritional habits are learned in childhood and later largely retained. But how do you get kids to eat healthily? Reminders and penalties go back quickly. Healthy nutrition works better if parents show it off. For sensitive eaters, but also overweight kids also help a few practical tricks.
The body of a child is growing. For this, kids need particularly high-quality food. Especially the following minerals and vitamins play a role:
- Calcium, phosphorus and vitamin D.
- Iron, zinc, selenium and folic acid
- Iodine for the thyroid gland
- Vitamin A
- B vitamins
- vitamin C
A healthy diet helps to turn kids into healthy adults – partly because the eating habits learned in childhood and adolescence usually continue into adulthood. Through their role model and choice of food, parents can promote their healthy kids diet.
How kids like to eat healthily
- If kids help with cooking or baking, washing lettuce or dressing, kneading meatballs or mashing mashed potatoes, this increases their enjoyment of (healthy) food.
- You can make compromises with older kids. If you are allowed to express your wishes for dinner once or twice a week, you will eat on the other days without much complaining.
- Common meals are important. Who puts his child alone at the table, should not be surprised if it hardly eats anything.
- The eye eats; this is especially true for kids. Alleged confusion like stew or casserole they reject spontaneously.
- Kids feel exactly when they are full – unlike some adults. However, they still have no sense of what amounts are filling, which means that the eye is often larger than the stomach of the small eaters.
- Special foods for kids, such as quarks or fruit juices enriched with calcium or vitamins, are neither necessary nor healthier, and often quite sugary. The daily dose of vitamins can also be supplied via a healthy diet.
- When tears do not give sweets to comfort, the child gets used to it and often has to contend with adult blubber as an adult.
- Kids understand abstract arguments like “you get big and strong,” “that makes you fat,” “you do not get bad teeth,” and they often do the opposite.
What do kids need every day?
- plenty of drinks to thirst-quench
- plenty of plant foods to eat
- moderately animal foods for growth and healthy development
- sparingly high-fat and sweet foods to enjoy and refine
Take time for the food
Even those who are unsure about cooking fast and healthy meals can choose from a wealth of guides on the book market. It will soon become clear that not more time is required here than with the heating of ready meals. Even kids like to help with cutting vegetables and salad.
It is equally important to take time for the common meal and thus give it some importance. The food should not take place next to the current TV, and smartphones should stay out of reach for this time. So kids automatically learn that food intake should not take place alongside, but should take an important part in the daily routine.