‘Train a child in the way he should go and when he is old he will not depart from it’

As a young teenager I was in the local running club. Every Saturday it was between me and my best friend who would win the women’s race. A couple of times during the week we would go down to the club and Noel, a great runner himself, would spend hours training us to run faster. Looking back, I feel humbled by his dedication. We didn’t pay him and I don’t even remember saying thank-you.

Tonight I am watching the All Blacks, who are NZ’s fabulous national rugby team (as of this moment ranked No. 1 in the world by the IRB), play France. They know all about training – it’s hard work and it takes time. Let’s hope they trained extra hard this week!

So what’s running and rugby got to do with healthy eating? As parents, we need to train our kids to make healthy food choices. Training is more than telling. If the All Blacks coach just told the team what to do then headed home, how well do you think they would do? If we just tell our kids to eat more fruit and vegetables, is that enough? Training takes time, effort and often thankless dedication.

Follow these 10 healthy eating training tips to set your children up for life:

1. Be Adventurous

One of the best gifts you can give your kids is to train their taste-buds to enjoy many different flavours, not just sugar, fat and salt. Children may have to try a new food up to ten times before they start to enjoy it. So don’t give up too soon. Tell your children that when they try a new food, even one bite, it’s a sign that they are growing up. And praise them lots.

Tasting samples at the deli or supermarket is a fun food adventure. I once left my 4 year old with his grandmother at a deli sampling table of various oils, marinades and sauces. A few minutes later I returned to find my son excitedly dipping the last of the bread into onion jam and thyme infused olive oil! They had tried almost every sample and eaten all the bread. That deli doesn’t do samples now!

Let your child choose a new food at the supermarket. Serve it with foods they love and they may love it too.

2. Eat five or more colours a day

All the wonderful colours in fruit and vegetables come from natural plant chemicals that have super-health effects on our body. Different colours have different effects so it’s good to eat lots of different colours each day. If the only colour your children like is red tomato sauce, then this may be where to focus your training.

Get your kids to list their favourite fruit and vegetables and class them into colours. Chose which colours they want to eat at each meal through the day, and give them coloured stickers to match.

If you have fruit trees, a vegetable garden or even a few herbs, involve your children or grandchildren in planting, watering, weeding and most importantly, eating. A child may leave the peas and carrots on the plate and tell you they hate tomatoes but chances are they will at least take a little bite if they have pulled the carrot from the ground, prized the peas from their pod or popped a ‘moon squirter’ (baby tomato) in their mouth. Food tastes so much better with a fun name or if you have just plucked it from a tree, vine or bush.

3. Drink Water

Buy your children a cool water bottle or two and encourage them to take them whenever they go out. Give them only water with their meals. Keep juice and other sweet drinks as ‘sometimes’ food, not ‘everyday’ food. Juice has valuable nutrients and gives a concentrated energy boost for active, fast growing children who can’t seem to eat enough food. But the bigger picture is that we want our children to go for water when they are thirsty, not insist on some sugar sweetened drink.

Talk to them about how their body needs plenty of water for sport and their brain needs plenty of water to concentrate. Put a sponge in some water and compare it to a dried out sponge. If our brain and body are dried out, it’s no wonder we get headaches, muscle cramps, and feel sluggish at school and on the sports field.

Part 2 of this series here…

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.