Kiddies don’t need to know all about nutrition before they learn to love food. Engaging with textures and flavours and enjoying a range of them is the most important thing. Conversations around nutrition can be fun, casual and provide interesting discussion. The content of these can change dependent on your child's mood.

The Importance of Variety

It is great, for example, for kids to understand at any early age the importance of eating lots of different foods. Vegetables are a great way of doing this. Let them find their rainbow in the family shopping basket but you don’t have to insist they eat the entire rainbow either.

Role Model Habits

If we are always talking about food or fat, our kiddies will pick up on that. Role modelling is one of the best ways to get our children on-board with healthy, balanced eating. Every bite we take and word we say matters here. It gets tricky to try and encourage our kids to eat veggies if we never touch them ourselves. Get eating that broccoli in front of your kiddies mums and dads!

The Only Time To Expose Your Children To Food Is At Mealtime

Research from the See and Eat project suggests reading books about vegetables, including how they are grown, harvested and cooked, can increase your child’s willingness to try them.

Keep It Equal

It is so easy for us to say cake is ‘yummy’ and not say the same about broccoli. If we make one food sound better, children will automatically want it more. So instead, try to talk about the food with its name, texture, or colour to keep foods more neural and equally desirable.

Out With The Bad, And The Good

You don't have to label foods as ‘good’ and ‘bad or ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’. Our job as parents is to make the choice about what we present our children and they make the choice as to whether to eat it. Low nutritional value foods don’t need to be off limits at all, but we should try to offer them less often. 

Hunger and Fullness Cues

We’re born knowing to eat when we’re hungry and stop when we’re full. But that’s easy to ignore when you’re surrounded by giant portions and food smells. To help kids listen to their bodies, don’t push them to have one more bite or clean their plate. Turn off screens during meals, too. They distract kids from paying attention to how much they’re eating and when they’ve had enough. Talk to them about the feelings in their tummies of hunger and fullness, and help them see when they need food or when they have had enough.