Other Tips for Helping Kids to Eat Right

In my last post, I discussed the main principles you need to follow to prevent or fix picky eating. Here are some other things we’ve discovered along the way that help them learn good food habits.

You need to model a good food relationship. If you are binging and snacking and trying various diets and complaining of being hungry and being preoccupied with your body image, your kids will notice and assume that’s a normal and acceptable way to live. They will pick up those habits, and their risk of having an eating disorder (or, at a minimum, a bad relationship with food) will be much, much higher. It’s a struggle in life you can prevent for them by following for yourself the principles outlined in the last post.

It's an ongoing effort. You have to stick to the principles in the last post every day, consistently, for life. It’s a lifestyle, not a parenting trend. If you slack, your kids will slide with you, and then you’ll have to all start over establishing good habits after you finally realize what a stressor food has become again. Living with discipline all the time is much easier.

Try doing a vegetable course first. For most meals, we start by putting only the veggies on the table, and that’s all we initially dish up for them. We don’t force them to eat all of the veggies before they can have anything else (I think that would turn them off from veggies), but we wait a while before giving them the rest of the meal. This actually helps them eat more vegetables most of the time!

The bad habit of not eating dinner. If they get into a habit of regularly not eating more than their one required bite for dinner because they “don’t like it yet” and just choose to be hungry until breakfast, that may mean they’re missing out on the majority of their veggies for the day. Because we’re really nice parents, we have, on occasion, put their dinner plate in the fridge and then heated that up for them in the morning for breakfast. Amazingly, they usually eat it really well, and it’s very effective at curbing that one-bite-for-dinner habit.

There should be no such thing as "kid food." There's probably something to that whole idea that little palettes are more sensitive or something, but feeding kids "kid food" (instead of what the adults are eating) is losing out on opportunities to help them start to learn to like new, amazing, delicious food. Plus, kid food never ends up being very healthful. Our kids ate everything we ate while we lived in Thailand, and it was initially hard at times, but they came to love so many amazing Thai foods! Even now, our 4-year-old says her favorite food is khao soi, which she initially would refuse to eat (other than the one required bite, of course).

Sitting down together for meals. All these things I’m talking about work much better if you have everyone sitting down and eating together. Not only does it help you track and enforce the good eating habits more easily, but mealtime becomes a looked-forward-to time when the whole family is together interacting. To help kids stay at the table, our rule is that if you get off your chair, that means you're done, so they know to just sit and eat until their tummies are full; they can’t get away with running off to play and then coming back for more later.

Because all kids are different, there is a great variability in how well kids will respond to these tactics. Some will have a hard go of it, but your patient consistency will win out in the end.