It’s important to start eating healthy early. If you leave your kids on a mission to eat healthy foods too late, it will be more difficult to change the habits they’ve learned. On the other hand, if you’ve always insisted that kids be healthy eaters in your home, you’ll find it a lot easier to keep your kids on the straight and narrow path of healthy eating.
Start with making sure you have healthy foods in your fridge and larder. You can’t teach your kids to eat a healthy diet if they are surrounded by candy, chocolate, and fizzy drinks. Remember that children are a perceptive bunch and they will quickly pick up on any discrepancy between what you say and what you do.
Get your kids to help you choose fruits and vegetables at the supermarket or grocery store. The feeling of being included is important. After all, if your kids have helped choose the food they eat, they’ll feel more involved and more likely to want to eat it. Plus if there’s something they simply won’t eat no matter what, involving them in the purchasing decision will at least save you from wasting food later.
Encourage your kids to drink plenty of water. Low fat milk is also good. And fruit juice is healthy but if they consume too much of it then the calorie intake can increase. If your kids enjoy drinking fresh orange juice, buy an inexpensive hand squeezer and let them squeeze their own juice. This will start a healthy eating habit for your kids and also slow down the rate of juice drinking – it would take a long time to squeeze a liter of juice by hand!
Eating out more regularly as a family is a good way to raise kids who eat healthier. The fact that you’re all sitting down for a meal instead of grabbing a quick snack on the way to somewhere else will make mealtimes an opportunity. This will almost certainly cause you to plan what your family eats more carefully. And as soon as you start thinking about the food you’re eating, you may find that the whole family starts eating more healthfully.
