Fresh Start - continued

Family Meals

Bringing the family together

Mealtimes make wonderful opportunities to get the whole family sitting together around the table and sharing in their day’s experiences. Of course, when children are very young it can be rather tricky to get the whole family eating together. My husband and I often find it hard to actually sit down to a meal when our children need help and supervision with their food. When the baby decides that he wants a breastfeed just as I am about to have my first mouthful (as babies do), it becomes impossible. And of course children’s evening routine and bed times might make it a challenge to have dinner together in the early years.

But still, I believe it is good practice to try and make the effort to sit together for a meal whenever possible. Children are more likely to want to try new foods if they see you eating them. This makes eating together a good opportunity to achieve diversity in your children’s diet, which is crucial in forming healthy lifelong eating habits.

Tips

If you are planning to eat with your children, either occasionally or all the time, make sure to have food ready at their usual mealtime to ensure as little stress as possible. If you wait for them to get overly hungry or tired they are likely to be irritable and difficult to manage…not a great combination for a pleasant meal. Try to keep mealtimes regular and predictable. It is much better to sit down to a proper meal three times a day than to snack constantly throughout the day. Having regular and planned meals also removes the need to use convenience food, and will stop your children from eating erratically.

If the prospect of a whole meal with your preschoolers is overwhelming, you could try sitting down with the kids to help them eat their main dish first. It will allow you to have yours in peace once their hunger is under control (here’s hoping!). You can then all enjoy sharing dessert together. This works well for us. Small children don’t have the attention span to sit through a lengthy meal, but just sitting down for dessert together has become a ritual during the weekend that everybody in our family looks forward to.

To make a shared meal successful, start by making sure you include at least one healthy food that you know your children enjoy. This way, they won’t be turned off by what is on the table. To make the meal more interesting and appetising to your children, include different colours and textures. Invest in dinnerware that is appropriate for preschoolers. Colourful plasticware is fun, almost unbreakable, and fairly cheap.

Accept that children behave like children, so don’t expect impeccable table manners. They learn from you, but there is a learning curve and perfect manners do not happen right away. Having said that, do encourage them to behave in an appropriate way and to ask for food or drinks politely.

Do not allow them to bring toys or games to the table. Young children are easily distracted and may not sit still for very long, so you need to eliminate obvious distractions. When you are eating together as a family, switch the television off. Mealtimes make great opportunities to catch up and share each other’s day and experiences. Watching TV takes this option away. Moreover, being distracted leads to gobbling food down without really appreciating it, and often to eating less nutritious foods in larger quantities.

Last but not least, try to always keep your cool. This may be difficult when you are tired and have spent time preparing a meal that remains almost entirely untouched. But keeping calm will stop your children from creating a negative association with food. Make the most of shared meals to teach your children good eating habits that will last a lifetime.

Getting Children Involved

Learning about food

The more you involve your children in the process of preparing and cooking food, the more likely it is that they will become healthy eaters. Involving children in food shopping and food preparation is sure to pay off. It catches their attention and gets them interested in new foods and tastes, which in turn will gently direct them towards eating a varied, balance diet for life. Fruit and vegetables suddenly become a lot more exciting if your children have been helping out planting, looking after, and harvesting a small garden. This can be done even if your backyard is on the small side. If you live in an apartment, you can plant radishes, strawberries, parsley, dill, mint, and other herbs in small pots.

If a veggie garden is not your thing, or you just don’t have time for one, find out where your nearest pick-your-own farm is located and make picking your own strawberries, raspberries, or blueberries a fun family activity. When you get home, turn the berries into homemade jams, tarts, fruit salads, sorbets, and fruit yoghurt. Even involving your children in shopping for fruit and veggies can be helpful, if you shop for these at a specialist shop and don’t have to go through the biscuit, chips, and chocolate aisles at the supermarket.

While shopping or looking after your garden, seize the opportunity and take the time to explain to your children what each fruit and vegetable can be used for. Preschoolers are thirsty for knowledge and will love learning about the season when each product will be ready for harvest, what colour it should be when ripe, whether it contains a stone or pips, whether or not it needs to be peeled or cooked, whether it is sour, acid, or sweet, and so on.

Cooking together

Another way to make a child interested in eating nutritious foods is to involve them in the preparation. If my kids are anything to go by, getting children interested in ice-creams or chocolate cookies is not a challenge at all, but vegetables can be a different story. A child’s level of involvement will vary depending on his age, but even very young children can help in some way. Always keep safety in mind and do not involve small children in cutting meat or veggies with a sharp knife, or in handling hot dishes.

Explain to your children what type of dish or dessert you are making. Ask them what they think of adding this or that ingredient, what difference they think it will make to the taste, and how much of the ingredient they think you should have, and they will love it even more. You can gently direct their answers, but always make them feel like their input and their help is extremely important to you.

When I cook, I often set out ingredients on the small children’s table where the girls can help me easily, and put my youngest one in the highchair where he can watch us. Although I do the peeling and chopping myself, I always let the girls mix and throw in some ingredients (who cares if we end up with a little too much dill or an overly generous dose of vanilla essence!), pour the batter for a cake into the tin (with a little help), sprinkle sliced almonds on top of a dessert to decorate, or garnish the plates with a few sprigs of fresh parsley or dill from our veggie garden before serving. Even babies as young as one will enjoy helping, and just seeing how proud it makes them is worth the few minutes longer that it takes to have involved the children. Doing such things will entice them to try and taste the new ingredients you are using for a particular recipe. This is how one of my daughters had her first taste of raw garlic!

For more information on these topics and many more, including (but not limited to!), how to encourage healthy eating, preschooler’s behaviour and taste, overcoming mealtimes struggles, lots of mealtimes tips and many great recipes for preschoolers, please refer to my new book FRESH START – Healthy Recipes and Food Tips for Parents of Preschoolers due to be released in September 2008.