Tips to encourage your children to eat healthily

Children can eat healthily, they can in fact even enjoy healty food.  Bad eating habits are learned but the good news is, children adapt to changes in their diets quite easily.

No matter what you do and what intentions you have for your child's diet, junk food, sweets and other "unhealthy" food will find it's way into your child's diet.  This is where you should employ the "everything in moderation" tactic.  Children should be allowed to experience all different tastes and that includes food that is not always the healthy option, but it should be balanced with an overall healthy eating plan.

Below you will find ideas to help your children learn to enjoy (and eat) the healthy food you want them to eat as well as the treats they crave.

 Setting a good example by eating healthily sounds like a great idea, in theory.  In practice it is much harder, as a busy parent finding the time to eat right can be difficult and the temptation to eat snack food when you are "up to your eyeballs" can be hard to resist.

Not only that, children are very clever, you can eat "healthy" food in full view of your children everyday, but if it is food that you don't actually enjoy yourself, they can tell straight away.

The best thing to do is find a few healthy meals or snacks that you do enjoy and make sure they are available to you and your family a few times a week.  When your children see you enjoying something they become curious about it and even if they don't ask to try it first time around, they will at some stage want to try "mommys favourite food"

 Children love to cook and bake, cooking with your children is a great way to encourage healthy eating.  Most children will at least try something new if they had a hand in making it. 

Tip:

Make sure you announce to everyone at the meal that your child "made this meal" your child is sure to feel proud of their achievement (which it is) but is also much more likely to eat it.

 Shopping for food with children may seem like a chore, but in fact it can be quite an enjoyable experience.  Here is a few points to make your shopping trip a success.

• Allow time for your shopping, if you are in a rush to get your groceries, find another day when you have time to bring your children for this tip.
• Write a healthy food shopping list and divide it into sections like, fruit, vegetables and so on.
• Give each child one of the sections as their own personal shopping list and allow your children to find the items on their list.
• Praise each child for completing their list and tell them that if they eat an item off their list, they will get a treat later on.

Even if you only do this once a month with your children, make sure their own personal lists each include an item you would like that particular child to eat.  It may seem counter productive to reward a treat for eating the new item of food but in reality one treat for getting them to eat something new is a small price to pay.

An important part of a childs diet is variety.  Ensuring that your children sample a wide variety of different foods early on will help them to develop a much wider range of food they are willing to try later on.

You dont always have to stick to healthy food, every now and then have a night where you try something new even if it is not entirely healthy.  Have a chinese takeaway or an indian take away,  order a variety of meals and give everyone a portion of each dish to try, they may not love all of them but you wont know if you don't try.