Teaching Good Eating Habits to Children

Love and good food bring out the best in a child. Providing a nurturing environment, loving nourishment, and wholesome food are fundamental for your child to be healthy, happy, “wholly”, AND as smart as possible.

Eating a variety of fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains, legumes, protein along with avoiding overly processed, refined, and chemically laden foods will enhance your child's intellectual, physical, emotional, and mental development.

Sharing at least one family meal per day, at a regular time, creates stability for children. Blessing the food and giving thanks will add a great deal of meaning to a child's life, and helps a child form a positive relationship with food. Mealtime is really not the time to have disagreeable discussions as this increases anxiety and decreases digestion.

Children love to play with food, so consider cultivating your child's interest in food and eating by encouraging him or her to help you (stirring, modeling dough into fun shapes, grinding spices with a mortar and pestle, peeling almonds, etc.). Make the main meal the most interesting and most important. When children are part of the meal preparation, they tend to enjoy it more.

It is also a good idea to involve your child in menu planning and table-setting. For example, ask your Pitta child to make a list of required tasks for meal preparation; Pitta-children love to make lists. The artistic Vata child could be selected to set a pretty table with place mats, candles and flowers, and the strong Kapha child could play waiter and clear the table.

These tasks give children a sense of responsibility and ownership towards the family dinner ritual, allowing their natural playfulness to come forward, bringing joy to mealtime.

Parents often encourage children to eat healthy, but this could backfire. As the child continually and repeatedly is told to eat healthy foods, his association to wholesome healthy eating can become a negative, nagging one. Do not force your child to eat because you think it is healthy. If you don't mention the word “healthy,” they just may eat it out of curiosity and authentic hunger. Also, it is quite normal for children to lose their appetites for a few days at a time. Below are tips that can ease the transition to healthy eating habits.

Offer small servings and let your child ask for more, or better yet, place the food on the centre of the table and let them help themselves, including dessert.

Announce the day's menu and tell your children that they may choose to eat the foods in any order, as long as they eat everything on the menu. This tactic, surprisingly, is highly successful.

Invite them to serve the meal as in serving others your child forms lifelong habits of mindfulness and kindness.

Offer small servings and let your child ask for more, or better yet, place the food on the centre of the table and let them help themselves, including dessert.

Announce the day's menu and tell your children that they may choose to eat the foods in any order, as long as they eat everything on the menu. This tactic, surprisingly, is highly successful.

Invite them to serve the meal. Involving your child in serving others forms lifelong habits of mindfulness.