Nutrition has always been something of great importance. It is something that can help us all get, stay, and maintain a healthy lifestyle. This stems from in utero, to our elderly years. In fact, it has been argued that what happens in utero, can greatly affect your elderly years. Unlike adults, children need more and more nutrients. These nutrients aid in the development of the bones, teeth, muscles, and blood volume. Proper nutrition is vital to the physical and mental development of all children.

The approximate stages for infancy and toddlers are as follows: infancy ranges from ages one thru three and toddler year range from three to five years of age. It also, mostly during the toddler years where they develop the tendencies to acquire a liking for certain foods, this can cause a great deal of stress and anxiety for parents, especially if their toddlers has developed a taste for sweets which is well known to cause a variety of problems and if not addressed in a timely and proper manner can lead to greater medical conditions as the child ages such as obesity and diabetes.

In addition to understanding proper nutrition, parents must also realize that their child’s wants are a normal and healthy part of child development. It is knowing and understanding the nutritional requirements during these early stages of development that can help parents relate to their children and instill the nutritional requirements to their child in place of the child’s wants such as candy and ice cream, and perhaps getting them used to vegetables.

Often times, parents allow family and friends to reward toddlers with gifts such as lollipops and other types of sugar filled snacks, and this isn’t a bad thing, often times, rewarding your child or allowing your toddler to have a treat is fine, but the issue that needs to be conveyed is consumption. Consumption is a key issue when it comes to nutritional guidelines. Over consumption can be related to bad and unhealthy foods and the very health foods.

            It should be noted that, while proper nutrition is vital to the development of all children, no matter what ages, you must take in to account that just because something works for one child, doesn’t necessarily mean that it is right or it will work for a completely different child who happens to be the same height, age, or weight. What needs to be known is that the human body is an extremely complex organism and we are all different.  There are hundreds of different cultures out there who have their own thoughts on proper nutrition and they won’t always coincide with everyone else’s. Sure, they may agree on one thing and that is they want the best for the child, but different cultures come with different customs.  The one common ideology that could possibly be agreed upon is, proper nutrition is vital to the physical and mental development of all children.