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Whether your child has always had a small appetite and eats too little for his nutritional needs or refuses to eat for a longer or shorter period, there are solutions to encourage your baby to eat a little more and always in a healthy way! Avoid emotional blackmail, play on cuddly or funny foods … Here are our tips and ideas to prevent the table from becoming a land of conflict!
How to stimulate baby’s appetite?
Do not force your child in the face of loss of appetite
Even if your child does not finish his plate, there is no need to force him to do so. A standoff may set in between you and him, which could block him even more. It may also be that associates the time of the meal with a discomfort. Discuss this with your child and your pediatrician or nutritionist.
No emotional blackmail even if baby skips a meal
We as parents often enter a vicious cycle of using food as a leverage. Despite everything, let’s avoid sentences like: “ If you eat we’ll be even more proud of you »: Our child must understand that he does not eat to please his parents. The meal must to be a pleasure for him.
Do not make the meal last too long despite a loss of appetite
Don’t let your child ruminate on food for long minutes. It might disgust him. No need to come back to the assault half an hour later. Your child also has the right not to be hungry. Eat at a fixed time. Get your child used to eating meals at the same times each day. Thus, he will be really hungry when it comes time to eat, ditto for the snack (we avoid nibbles after 16:30 p.m.).
What to do when baby eats less or refuses to eat?
Favor small amounts when baby no longer wants to eat
As a rule, children don’t like overly full plates. Then give them small portions of each food. Are some big enough? Do not hesitate to cut them into slices, pieces or mix them, for example. If you are worried that you have given him too little food, don’t worry, if he is still hungry, he will ask for more.
Cooking with our little one funny foods
To make it enjoyable to eat, you can make him participate in the preparation of a dish. Then load him with a few small missions: mixing ingredients … Make him smell herbs or spices, taste raw vegetables … He will thus discover the foods and will have more pleasure in eating what he has prepared himself.
Why not add a touch of whimsy to the dinner dish? To cook colored pastes, for example. Present the dishes in such a way as to whet his appetite: form a face with lettuce for hair, tomatoes for the eyes, an egg cut in half for the nose, and corn for the mouth. This plate will amuse him a lot!
What if it was teething?
The sudden lack of appetite in our baby can also come from a malaise: sore throat, teething, stomach aches … We do not hesitate to discuss this with our pediatrician if the blockage to our child’s food is of concern to us.
How do I feed my child? The right foods
- Dairy products. Give him at least three dairy products a day (yoghurts, milk, petits-suisse) which will provide him with calcium, proteins, vitamins, and iron. They are essential for bone development and for the development of brain structures.
- Fruits and vegetables. They are essential for all the minerals and vitamins they contain, and in particular vitamin C. It is found in oranges, grapefruits, mandarins, kiwis … If your child has trouble chewing these foods, don’t do not hesitate to prepare them in juice. For all fruits, think of compotes, it will swallow them much more easily.
- Meats, fish, poultry, and eggs. They provide the animal proteins essential for the development of your child. You can cook them in different ways to make him want to eat them. Often a piece of meat is not easy to chew. Think of minced meat, mixed fish, etc.