Healthy Food Healthy Kids
The question I get most often from parents is, “How do I get my kids to eat healthy?”. As a parent myself, this topic is not merely one of knowledge, but of personal experience. My advice can be summed up in the following statement: your leadership plus their ownership. Our children are always watching us, and this includes what and how much we eat. They’re also in the process of discovering life and more about themselves, which constantly includes new food options and what they prefer.
OUR LEADERSHIP
As parents, we’re the one who’s responsible for grocery shopping, meal planning and food preparation. Our children are dependent upon our decisions and actions to provide them food options. If there’s food in our house, whether healthy or unhealthy, it’s there because we allowed it. Whatever the guidelines for food choices, mealtimes and family routines are, we are the ones with the final say. The responsibility to provide a healthy structure falls on parents. This also means that we must adhere to the same structures and ideals that we’d like our children to follow. Leaders lead from the front. As parents, we cannot expect our kids to ‘do as we say and not as we do’ when it comes to food, or really any part of life.
THEIR OWNERSHIP
As parents, it’s also our job to guide our children to be responsible people, which includes their ability to make wise decisions. To accomplish this, we must give our children options and the freedom to choose. When it comes to food, providing healthy options for our children to choose from teaches them to decide to do the right thing, instead being forced to. This makes the process more fun for our kids, creating more buy-in to them eating more of how we’d like.
I know that feeding our family, including our children, isn’t easy. It takes time, thought and effort, constantly. Making meal plans, grocery lists, and shopping every week (or more frequently) and preparing food every day is an endless job that can be under appreciated. Especially when there’s plenty of inexpensive and convenient less-then-healthy options constantly available. However, just like everything else in life, the more you practice the better you get at it. Here’s a few examples from how we regularly feed our kids that may give you some ideas to try for your own household.
· We regularly have vegetables available. Typically, this is broccoli, or a medley of broccoli, cauliflower, and carrots. Sometimes it’s potatoes, or carrot sticks, or cucumbers. Often we get fresh-frozen vegetables (ALDI has a ‘season’s best’ brand that’s great, and affordable)
· We regularly have fruits available. Bananas, strawberries, raspberries, and blue berries are staples in our fridge. We also have apples, watermelon, pineapple, kiwi, and melons available at different times.
· We regularly have lean protein available. This is traditionally chicken, hard-boiled eggs, or Greek yogurt, but sometimes it’s pork or beef. Protein can be difficult because it usually requires preparation. If you’re in a pinch for time to cook; rotisserie chicken, fresh sliced deli meat, or purchasing cooked meat from the grocery store are all great options.
· We often take our kids grocery shopping with us. It’s a family event. We let them pick out the fruit, veggies, and proteins they’d like for the week. We also let them pick out a snack food of their choice and a few entre-style foods they’d like to have available. The snacks are usually goldfish, turkey sticks or yogurt. The entre-style foods are the traditional ‘kid-foods’ that most households have; mac-n-cheese, corndogs, hot dogs, pizza bites, chicken nuggets, taquitos, waffles, cereal, pop-tarts, and chocolate milk.
· We often allow our kids to include their own portion of food into their meal. Our breakfasts include fruit and hard-boiled eggs (if we’ve got them), plus whatever else they’d like to include (when we’re not pressed for time!). Sometimes it’s a small bowl of cereal or oatmeal, other times is a pop-tart. On the weekends it’s sausage or bacon and maybe pancakes or scrambled eggs (and they love when Dad gets donuts!) . They enjoy orange juice, apple juice, or chocolate milk. Their lunches (on the weekends) are usually a simple with fruits, veggies, and protein that we already talked about while grocery shopping. Usually, it’s as simple as sandwich or yogurt with fruit during the summertime, and they usually eat school lunches during the year. Dinner is fruit, veggies, and protein again, plus an entre of their choice that we purchased throughout the week, and every now and then we get take out.
· We regularly eat the fruit, vegetables and protein too. We share in the expectations we have for our kids. Fruit, vegetables, and proteins are staples in our meals as well. We also let them help with cooking when appropriate and preparing for the mealtimes. If we’re having a meal with mixed food (tacos, bacon wrapped chicken, egg and avocado sandwiches, etc.), we share a tasting with our kids, and if they don’t prefer it, we allow them to choose their own version of the meal. We don’t force them to eat a certain amount of food or a certain type of food. While at the same time, if they choose something, we do expect them to eat it. If they have leftovers, they save them for later that day or for the same meal on the next day.
These are the things that work for us. We aren't perfect, and no meal plan ever will be. We do our best to be consistent, and adapt when we need to. This isn’t everything that we do in detail, but in general we always fall back on these principles and routines. There are plenty of other good ideas that would work very well. You’re the expert when it comes to your own family. You know what’s best for your schedule and preferences. Be the leader. Encourage your children to follow you where it matters most and give them the freedom to make decisions for themselves that you approve of. Practice what you believe would be in the best interest of your children. They’re depending on you.
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