So your child is a picky eater. What can you do?
It can be super frustrating when your child only wants to eat French fries for breakfast, lunch, dinner. There are still some effective ways you can help make healthy foods favorite choices or at least more frequent choices in your home. Here are some tips to how to get your kids to eat a little bit better:
- Where do foods come from? Visit a farm with your little one. Explore the crops where foods come from and how they grow. Can you try planting your own fruit and vegetable? We try to do this every season at our local farm. We go through and walk the crops and talk about all the vegetables and fruit and even let him "water" them with his water bottle. It sounds far fetched- but he loves it every time. I will offer him something new that we saw at the farm at home and remind him that he helped grow it by watering it- he at least takes one bite!
- Play a guessing game! This is for a little bit of an older kid- but its fun and works! Prepare several foods for your child to taste while he or she is blindfolded. See if your child can identify each food. Help your child use words to describe what he or she tastes, such as salty, sweet, crunchy, smooth, warm, cold and so on.
- Try something new. Allow your child to try a new fruit or vegetable. When you go to the store let them pick out something that's a little different and new to them. Maybe a jicama, mango or a papaya! Let them be a part of cutting it up or prepping it when they get home and have them taste their handy work. I will say- no matter what I am making if I let Kenzie play "chef" he always will at least taste one bite.
- Do a taste test or a crunch test! Dip carrots into three different flavors of low-fat dressing or try a crunch test with three different kinds of vegetables to see which vegetable crunches the loudest!
- Glam up fruits and veggies- Did you know that adding raw spinach to any smoothie is almost completely tasteless?! You can make a breakfast smoothie for your little one that had vanilla almond milk, avocado, ground chia seeds (omega 3), banana, strawberry, raw spinach and ice. It tastes sweet and it packed with healthy foods and healthy fats (for brain development).
- Don't give up. They say it can take 10 times to try a food before you like it. Even if you put it in their lunch or on their plate and they don't eat it- you are still winning. be patient- being a picky eater is pretty normal and part of children's development. They will come around as long as you make healthy food available, don't give in to letting them live on candy and junk food, and lead by example.