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Healthy eating is not just about choosing healthy and varied foods. What habits should we instill in our children? How to diversify the palette of their tastes and turn a formal meal into a situation of pleasant communication, into a ritual that brings real pleasure? Advice from our experts.
stand your ground
Does the idea that a child should eat at certain hours and try everything they are given seem banal to you? Certainly. However, child psychologists and pediatricians note that parents are increasingly avoiding firm attitudes and indulging children, wanting to avoid conflicts and please their child.
Delivery of positions begins in the supermarket. According to nutritionist Laurent Chevalier, every second child influences their parents’ grocery shopping. As a result, food bought to order and given out on demand turns children into domestic tyrants and impoverishes their palate, and floating meal times encourages “biting”.
Turn off the TV while eating
Does your child stop watching TV while eating? Now he apparently eats in the company of a smartphone or tablet? In any case, this is a bad habit that makes us “sensory illiterate”: directing all our attention to the screen, we are unable to enjoy the taste of food to the fullest.
Such a ritual is especially harmful for very young children – carried away by a cartoon or a TV show, they simply swallow food and overeat without noticing, because they are not able to feel full.
How to act? Set a good example: find a pleasant topic for conversation at the table so that the meal is more measured, and eat slowly, enjoying the present moment. Your children will unwittingly imitate you.
Influence different senses
Before eating, teach your child to “eat with their eyes”, inhale the smells coming from the plate, chew food well to feel what it consists of, listen to different sensations on the tongue (juicy food, crispy, melting in the mouth … ), distinguish sounds (we gnaw raw or boiled carrots) and, finally, use the whole gamut of tastes (sour, salty, bitter, sweet …). And do not forget to ask them to comment on various sensations, sometimes you can do this even with your eyes closed.
Don’t dramatize the situation.
Children, like adults, are good and bad eaters. It is pointless to try to change their nature, you will only waste your time and instill in them an aversion to food. If you are really concerned, check with your pediatrician. If not, then wait until adolescence. As a rule, at this time, little ones, especially boys, begin to eat more, and former gluttons, on the contrary, become more indifferent to delicacies.
Be patient
Children rarely like what they try the first time. Food neophobia (fear of everything new) is characteristic of many children and usually persists until the age of seven. The solution to the problem is this: prepare this product differently, in combination with other ingredients, different spices, and regularly offer it to the child until he gets used to it (but do not force him to eat it).
At least 15 times (!) To offer children new products is advised by a specialist in baby nutrition from the University of Michigan (USA) Mildred Horodinski. Another trick: if a child admires one of the elders – a brother, sister, cousin, friend – and he eats “nasty” food, then sooner or later he will decide to imitate him. If your child has a particularly persistent aversion to a particular food, check to see if they are allergic to that food.
Show your imagination
Talking about healthy and unhealthy foods with children is useless. Between the ages of two and ten, they eat because they are hungry or because they enjoy it. It makes sense to discuss health issues from the age of 12 or 13, when teenagers begin to be conscious of their body and understand what good health means.
Another bad idea is to reward your child for eating vegetables. This will only increase his aversion to kale or spinach. If, on the contrary, you cook with imagination – for example, serve mini vegetables, make beautiful vegetable casseroles with grated cheese and pasta – then refusal will gradually give way to curiosity, and then pleasure.
Invite them to cooperate
You can take a two-year-old child with you to the market so that he can look, touch, smell what he will eat for lunch or dinner. Ideally, it would be good to organize an educational family trip to the village or to the farm, so that the child understands where the tomatoes and carrots on his plate come from.
Invite him to help you set the table and cook as entertainment. Let him do what he wants, of course, slowly looking after him: let him peel an egg, lay out slices of cheese, mix salad or sauce, lay out cutlery … Pride in his “adult” work will increase his appetite, the child will more willingly and boldly try unfamiliar dishes.
Watch how they sleep
Yes, do not be surprised, sleep and food are closely related. Ghrelin, secreted by our stomach, is a hormone that increases the need for food. If a person does not get enough sleep, the body releases too much ghrelin, which leads to bursts of intense hunger throughout the day.