Getting The Kids To Eat It
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I came across this section about encouraging children to eat healthy foods at the Attachment Parenting International website:
Nurturing a Taste for Nutritious Food
- Model healthy eating habits
- Try to make at least one meal a day a time for connection and community
- Toddlers need to eat small meals during the day and should not be expected to sit at a dinner table for long periods of time
- Encourage a child to follow his bodily cues for hunger and thirst, to eat when he is hungry and stop when he is full.
- Forcing a child to eat, or to eat a certain food, is counterproductive and can lead to unhealthy eating habits and potentially eating disorders
- Avoid the use of food as a reward or punishment, or of making food (or dessert) contingent on behavior
- Rather than restricting access to certain foods, consider having only healthy options available in the home and allowing the child to choose
The advice is useful to anyone raising or planning to raise vegetarian or vegan children. And it’s not even intended for vegetarian or vegan parents! It’s just for healthy parents who want to have healthy kids.
For more tips about how to get kids to eat vegan, take a look at the “kids” section here at the Soapbox >>
I have long preached about this. It isn’t that children “hate vegetables” or need to learn how to like them. They simply respond to the messages sent by the parents. When a parent says you have to eat your broccoli or you won’t get dessert he or she is saying there is something wrong with the broccoli, that no right-minded person would prefer it over dessert. As in all other aspects of parenting, we have to model what we want from our children.