1 Ensure regular meal and snack times. Children respond best to a routine.
2 Serve child-sized amounts. Big serves of food are daunting to a little one.
3 Don’t give up on the first attempt. Children can take 8-10 tries before they like a new flavour. A child may spit out beans at 18 months and be happily dipping them in tzatziki (yoghurt with finely chopped cucumber and mint) at two and a half. Offer only one new food at a time and serve it with familiar foods.
4 Try it Raw. Some kids hate cooked vegetables but will happily munch on raw carrot sticks, cauliflower pieces, snow peas and green beans while you prepare dinner. Who knows: they may eat their daily vegetable quota (about 1 cup) before they even get to the dinner table!
5 Use shapes and colours. Cut fruit, cheese, bread and vegetables into interesting shapes such as cubes, sticks, and circles. Arrange food on the plate to look like a house, flower, or a face with grape eyes, grated cheese hair, carrot stick mouth and baby tomato nose.
6 Name it. My four-year-old recently enjoyed fish, vegetables and a pile of mashed potato because it was called “Tracey Island” from Thunderbirds!
7 No distractions. Turn off the television. Have children stop their play and sit up at the table to eat. Meal-time is for eating, not playing.
8 Check that children have not filled up on milk, fruit juice or snacks just before dinner. Milk is more like a food than a fluid – nutritious and filling. Keep it for set meal and snack times. Children who ‘live’ on milk can miss out on important nutrients because they are too full to eat other foods.
9 Have a taste-testing session. This worked amazingly well for a fruit-phobic five-year-old. Together we shopped for a variety of fruit that he thought he did not like but was prepared to grade with a tick or a cross after trying. He sat down and very seriously tasted a tiny morsel of each one. He was completely free to give it a tick or a cross. His mother and I asked his opinion of each and made if a fun game. There was no pressure on him to eat any of the fruit as it was not a meal time. To his surprise, and ours, he ended up giving a tick to almost every fruit!
10 Lead by example. Actions speak louder than words. If our regular lunch is a burger and soft drink, we can’t expect our kids to want sandwiches, fruit and water.

My son spent at least a year of his toddler-hood refusing all meat and chicken. As he had been the ‘perfect eater’ up until that time I was in shock! I was fanatically aware of the importance of iron for his brain development, as only as over-caring , nutritionally trained mother can be, and had to use great amounts of self control not to panic and force-feed him!

I tried to feed him every other source of iron possible – iron-fortified cereal, peanut butter on wholemeal bread, hummus, spinach, eggs, dried apricots, figs, baked beans, all served with vitamin C-rich fruit to enhance absorption.

Meanwhile I tried disguising meat in pasta sauce, mini-meatballs, meatloaf, tiny morsels hidden in fried rice, chicken liver pate on crackers and finely sliced fillet steak delicately arranged around the plate with other choice morsels. Most of my efforts were rejected. Each time I fell into frantic visions of my son’s brain atrophying from lack of iron I reminded myself that this was a stage that would end. Not many 15-year-old boys refuse steak.

Picture this: you’ve spent hours preparing child friendly mini-meatballs in a naturally colourful home-made tomato sauce. You’ve served it imaginatively on the plate surrounded by a few green peas, beautifully carved carrot sticks, an artistic sprinkle of cheese. You place it on the table before your darling toddler. Her face screws up in disgust. “Yuk! I don’t want it. I’m not hungry”.

There are so many options for a response here: “Look, I’ve spent hours making this” (don’t expect sympathy from a three-year-old); “Well, what would you like instead?” (you’re not a restaurant) to bribery: “If you eat this, you can have some ice cream” (Bingo! This is how to get the sweet stuff!).

Toddlers soon learn if refusing a meal will get them what they really want. It really is a battle of control and we, the parents, need to win.

Put the meal in the fridge and re-heat it when your child gets hungry or at the next meal-time. If it means going to bed with no dinner one night, try to suppress those feelings of sympathy and guilt, and think about the long-term goal. No child ever faded away from missing a meal.

“I don’t like carrots; I want animal biscuits!” My three year old nephew screamed as his grandmother and aunty unsuccessfully tried to feed him dinner. “You need to eat something healthy. Here, just try a tiny bit of this yummy mashed potato”. “No – I want pasta!”

For 20 minutes we struggled. Tears were falling, tempers were rising, time-out hadn’t worked. Then against every sense of healthy eating we gave in. “Hey, we’re not the parents. Our sanity is more important than meat and veges.” So we served plain pasta (no sauce allowed) artistically surrounded by coloured animal biscuits, poured ourselves some wine, and finally relaxed.

Every parent has moments like this – where giving in is easier than taking a stand. Sometimes we have to do it for our emotional health and sometimes for social reasons – to avoid World War III at the café!

But making the effort to teach our kids healthy eating habits is one of the best gifts we can give them for their long-term health.

Why do we feel guilty if they eat pasta & animal biscuits for dinner?

Instinctively we know that the food we feed our children has a huge effect on their growth, behaviour and health. Otherwise why would we bother goading them to eat vegetables, resorting desperately to sayings such as “Eat your carrots, they make you see in the dark” (based on the fact that they contain beta-carotene, a type of vitamin A of which a deficiency causes night blindness) and “What about the starving children in Africa?” (based on no logic at all – finishing your dinner unfortunately doesn’t help them). Why do we feel so guilty if they eat pasta and animal biscuits for dinner?

Here’s some of the science that supports our instinct:

Babies who are breast-fed have less risk of developing allergies
Toddlers who are deficient in iron can have impaired brain and intellectual development, which is permanent and irreversible
Children who have a lower saturated fat intake in childhood are less likely to develop insulin resistance – a key predictor for diabetes and heart disease
Babies who are underweight in their first two years of life and who then gain weight rapidly have a greater risk of insulin resistance and heart disease in adulthood
Around two out of every three obese children will become obese adults, especially children who are still obese after the age of 10.

How our food habits are formed

The food we grow up with is often the food we prefer as adults. Think about the foods you like to eat; many of these will be foods you ate as a child. My mother went through a health phase when we were kids. She decided we didn’t need salt but we did need wheat germ (a great source of vitamins B and E). So we all had wheat germ sprinkled on our salt-free porridge every morning. What started as taste bud torture soon became normal, and we all still eat porridge that way!

Food routines can also carry over into adulthood. If you grew up in a family where you all sat around the television enjoying fish and chips while watching the rugby, chances are that as an adult you will not sit down to watch the rugby with a bowl of carrot sticks.

Take these first two steps to encourage healthy eating habits in your children.

1. Eat together as a family

Eating together as a family is important. Even if your busy schedule doesn’t allow for eating together as a family every night, try to have at least one night a week where you all sit down together.

This is where children learn the social aspects of food: how to set the table, how to use cutlery, table manners, and how to chat over a meal rather than grunting a few syllables while mesmerised by the television. They see how you eat and what you eat.

It’s also gives you a chance to give children more control over what they eat: place the food on the table buffet-style and let them help themselves. They may be tempted to try the hated courgette when they see everyone else enjoying it.

2. Get kids involved

Life is a great adventure for young children and food can be part of it.

Let them pick herbs or vegetables out of the garden, if you have one.
Point out interesting fruit and vegetables in the supermarket and let them choose one to take home.
Let them help you pat out the scones or measure out ingredients for baking. Be prepared for some mess and the odd spill. Fruit smoothie on your clothes and egg shells in the cake mix is worth it if the children grow up viewing healthy food as fun.

Original article written by me (Cindy). Reprinted with permission Healthy Food Guide magazine.