Health Topics
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Healthy Living
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| Parenting a Picky Eater |
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Sunita Pant Bansal
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- Prepare simple, healthy meals that the whole family will enjoy. Often it helps to have more than two different dishes, so your child has a choice. If your child refuses to try the food, don’t nag and don’t prepare a new meal. Just say pleasantly, “Oh well, maybe you’ll like the next meal better.â€
- Be a good role model for your child. Eat a variety of foods and show your appreciation for them. Children often get curious about food when it’s giving pleasure to others.
- Do not be too strict about table manners with small children. Keep mealtimes enjoyable. For small children, part of the fun of eating is feeling the texture of the food in their hands.
- Limit the fluid intake of your child to two to three cups of milk a day, and a glass of juice. Children very often fill up their stomachs with these or soft drinks and then have no room for other regular foods.
- Avoid giving your child bribes or rewards for eating certain foods. These forms of enticement might work in the short term, but they don’t help your child develop a lifetime pattern of healthy eating.
- If you feel your child is consistently not meeting the minimum nutritional requirements or is not gaining weight, then you should discuss this with your family doctor.
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Expose to variety
A child needs to be exposed to a new food between 10 and 15 times before he or she will accept it. But many parents give up long before that, thinking their child just doesn’t like it. So even if your child only plays with the paneer on her plate, don’t give up. One day she just may surprise you by taking a bite. However, don’t go overboard and try to introduce three new foods at every meal. Limit exposure to one or two new foods a week. |
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Beware of over-snacking
Sometimes the problem isn’t so much that the child doesn’t like new foods, it may be that they are already full. A common culprit is fluid. Children can consume a lot of their calories from milk, juice and aerated drinks. The same goes for snacks that provide little more than calories like chips and sweets. If you are going to offer snacks, make sure they are
supplementing meals, not sabotaging
them. |
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No bribes
Avoid using sweets as a bribe to get kids to eat something else. Doing so can send the message that doing the right thing should involve an external reward. The real reward of sound nutrition is a healthy body, not a chocolate. |
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Examine the role model
Make sure you aren’t asking kids to “do as I say, not as I doâ€. If your own diet is based mainly on fried and spicy foods, you can hardly expect your child to embrace a salad burger over French fries. |
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Defuse mealtimes
Don’t make your child’s eating habits part of the mealtime discussion, otherwise every meal becomes a stressful event, centered on what the child does and does not eat. Talks about the importance of good eating should be reserved for bedtime or story time. |
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