It’s important to start healthy eating early. If you leave the mission of getting your children to eat healthy foods too late, it will be more difficult to change the habits they have learned. On the other hand, if you have always insisted on having healthy eating children in your home, then you will find the task of keeping your children on the straight and narrow path of healthy eating a much easier task.
Start by making sure you have healthy foods in your fridge and pantry. You can’t teach your kids to eat a healthy diet if they are surrounded by candy, chocolate, and sodas. Remember that children are a perceptive bunch and will quickly pick up on any discrepancies between what you say and what you do.
Have your children help you choose fruits and vegetables at the supermarket or grocery store. The sense of participation is important. After all, if your children have helped choose the foods they are going to eat, they will feel more included and are more likely to want to eat them. Plus, if there’s something they just won’t eat, no matter what, involving them in the purchase decision will at least save you having to waste food at a later stage.
Encourage your children to drink plenty of water. Low-fat milk is also good. And fruit juice is healthy, but it can rack up the caloric stakes if you take to drinking too much. If your kids develop a taste for freshly squeezed orange juice, buy one of the inexpensive manual juicers and let them squeeze their own juice. This will start a healthy eating habit for your children and will also slow down the rate at which they drink juice – squeezing a quart of juice by hand will take a long time!
Eating together as a family more regularly is a good way to raise kids on healthy eating. The fact that everyone is sitting down together for a meal instead of picking up a quick snack on the way to another place will make mealtimes more of an occasion. This will almost certainly cause you to plan more carefully what your family eats. And as soon as you start thinking about the foods you’re eating, you’ll find that the whole family is starting to eat healthier.