When was the last time you remember your kid happily eating the healthy food and thanking you for that or asking for some more? So how can you teach our kids about healthy food and its importance?
Our quality of life and health is strongly dedicated to the food we intake and lifestyle we lead. Teaching kids about healthy eating need to be fun to interest them. Parents have the most important role to play in a child’s healthy food habit as well as schools emphasizing the importance of healthy food eating activities for kids.
Different Ways to Teach Kids about Healthy Food
Everyone wants their kids to make a smart decision for themselves, isn’t that true? But how? Here are few ways oh how to teach kids to eat healthily.
1. Activities:
Activities and games are kid’s best friends always. Try this with your kids. Take a large chart paper and make 2 separate columns – “Yay” and “Nay”. Yay means the ‘healthy’ food they must have and nay is the ‘unhealthy’ food or the ‘sometimes’ food. Cut out some pictures from the magazines or newspaper for food items and place it in front of them. Let them paste the yays and nays. Once they are done, discuss the choices they have made and improvements where ever necessary. The ‘maybe’ could be another column you add when you agree with the kid. Another good activity could be to plant tomatoes and melons in the garden and help your child to nurture them.
2. Involve the Kids:
When you are planning a meal menu, preparing food or going for a grocery shopping, involve your kids. When they feel connected to the things happening, they are more likely to eat. Teaching kids about food have its role to play even in the grocery shop by introducing them to the healthy frozen Greek yogurt or fruit parfaits etc. Your little one is going to eat them once he sees them in the store as well.
3. Freedom of Choice:
Teaching kids to eat healthily does not mean you hand over a list of things and force it on them. Rather, stock your kitchen with healthy and kid-friendly snacks and choices for them to eat. They will reach out to the shelves and cabinets without your help and much on healthy foods. Some children eat more when they are in the car as compared to while sitting on the table as there wasn’t a mode of distraction or play available. In such cases, you must be prepared with nutritious choice of food for your little one to enjoy like sliced apples, salad sticks like carrot or a whole grain cracker with light popcorns and raisins etc.
4. Teach them The Source Of Food:
The important bit for the parent is to teach the kids where foods come from. Instead of limiting yourself to the supermarket every week, you must venture and take your child to the nearby dairy farm or a local farmer’s market. Have them introduced to the people who grow food. Teach them how much time and care farming requires and also tell them the importance of naturally prepared food or environmentally healthy food.
There are many activities for the kids in such farms, find out before you go and book it beforehand, for example – berries picking from a vine or feeding the cattle etc. Teach them where milk comes from and why we should care about what goes into our body. Tell them how are food processed in a factory and what are the disadvantages of feeding on them. Tell them apples come from trees and carrots grow in the ground but gelatin comes from the factory.
5. Make it Fancier:
We all have or are dealing with picky eaters. Thus the foremost thing is to make their food look fancier and every time teach them the importance of eating it. Make some fancy dips for them if they do not like eating vegetables. Ranch salad dressing or hummus, salsa or any yogurt based dressing are few of the healthy choices your kids might enjoy dipping and eating their vegetables.
6. Be a Role Model:
While you ask your kids to eat vegetables, you cannot be seen ordering and devouring burgers or pizzas at the drive-through. You must also follow your diet constantly and must not have erratic eating habits as your child grows up thinking a behavior like this is normal. Try to send the right message to your kids via your eating habits and also let your kid learn from you.
7. Begin Early:
It is never too early to start teaching kids about food. Use the snack and mealtime for your kids to teach them and help your little one making a better choice each time and wisely select the food to eat. Have creative ways to make a greater variety of foods. Realize when you kid overeats at times and why. Having popcorns at movies and ice creams at the park is a real pleasure treat. As long as it balances other food and lifestyle, it comes under the smart choice of food items. You kid must burn the extra energy and indulge in physical activities.
8. Mobile Applications:
There are various applications in the market today to support the needs of teaching kids healthy eating. The “Healthy food monsters” is a quest to find all the healthy food and avoid all the unhealthy foods and snacks from the game that gets kicked out. Another game “Healthy heroes” which is another amazing game appealing more to the boys with the bundle of adventure teaching the kids about nutrition and promotes healthy behavior.
The monsters in the game are hungry who have to be fed with fruits and vegetables in order to stop them from destroying everything. “ABC Foods” is a game full of the exciting food world. Expose your kids to learning about food with this game where you can even control the amount of time they spend playing it. It teaches the kids to learn new words through sights, sound, and touch. See your little one chop celery; slice strawberries, cook pasta and more such amazing pictures with interactive videos and scenes.
9. Desktop Games:
There are plenty of desktop games available too which come under few amazing healthy food eating activities for kids. “Food balance game” which is from an Australian Government Eat for Health Website(R) where kids are allowed to choose the healthy food options from the five food groups available for meals and snacks for the complete day. “Fuel up to play 60” has excellent choices of games which include the classifying the identified foods into categories / 5 groups and the health benefits of each of them.
10. Books:
Books are plenty in number and are also easily available from the nearby libraries. Kids respond to the hidden messages well instead of feeding them with the direct instructions which they pay deaf year to after a while. Few books like “The Hungry Caterpillar”, “Green Eggs and Ham”, “Eat Your Peas” etc. which help them distinguish foods and give powerful lessons on being open to trying new foods.
Having spoken about ways you could teach your kids about healthy food, most importantly, you must understand which way suits your child. It could be a trial and hit method that you might have to go through, but it must surely help you to guide your kids to eat healthy and better.
