Tips for Feeding your Toddler

Tips for Feeding your Toddler

August 27th, 2010 by admin  |  No Comments

Toddlers are notorious for finicky and strange eating habits. Even if your child was a great eater as a baby, you may suddenly find yourself confronted with a whole different person when the toddler years come along. With a new desire for independence and a newly discovered ability to voice opinions, feeding your toddler any kind of healthy toddler diet can be a difficult challenge. Try these tips to make it a little easier.

Mix It Up

Pairing a food your toddler refuses to eat with one that he likes might encourage him to actually eat it all – but not if you let him pick and choose. The best way to get a toddler to eat a food he generally refuses is to mix it in with the one he likes. If he wants a great big bite of that macaroni and cheese, there’s no way to get it without a few French-cut green beans along for the ride. That spaghetti sauce he loves, well, there are now grated carrots and finely chopped spinach inside. And no way to avoid them.

Mix up all kinds of healthy foods with toddler-friendly favorites: finely chopped vegetables are easily added to meatballs; soups are a great place to add more veggies too. Add extra fruit to oatmeal and yogurt, and even ice cream. Blend bananas, berries and other fruits into pancake batter.

Fun Finger Foods

Toddlers love foods that are fun to eat, so serve up finger foods with interesting options for dips. Vegetables are suddenly a lot more interesting with a choice of dips, such as a cheese sauce or ranch dressing. Take the meatballs out of the spaghetti sauce and serve them as a finger food with marinara on the side for dipping.

Pieces of fruit can be served this way too; use vanilla yogurt as a tasty dip for apple, pear and banana slices as well as fresh berries.

Use dinner rolls to make sliders for little hands, topped with small slices of tomatoes and piece of lettuce. Then put mustard and ketchup on the side to dip the slider into. When you up the fun quotient of a food, you make it a lot more interesting to a toddler.

Work With, Not Against Your Toddler

Sometimes the best you can do with a toddler is to wave the white flag and make peace. Dinner time power struggles don’t get anyone anywhere useful. You will wind up frustrated and your child will not learn anything. Try to find a compromise. If she really doesn’t like broccoli, there is likely nothing you can do to make her eat it. Try to substitute other foods that offer similar nutritional value. Explain to your toddler that you know she doesn’t like broccoli, so you aren’t going to make her eat it. Instead, she can try this spinach, which you think she will like a whole lot more.

If your toddler has that common obsession with foods staying separate on the plate, don’t get frustrated because you don’t understand it. Instead, show her you get it by letting her choose a plate with separate compartments for all her foods.

Feeding a toddler can be frustrating, but if you keep your cool and find ways to make foods more interesting, you will have a lot more success than with demands and ultimatums. When your toddler feels you are listening and understanding, you will get more cooperation than when you try to lay down the law.

Do You Have a Picky Eater?

Do You Have a Picky Eater?

January 6th, 2010 by admin  |  No Comments

Nothing frustrates a parent more than preparing a delicious, healthy meal for the family only to have a child take one look at it and prepare to leave the table. Living with a picky eater isn’t easy, but most children will go through a phase of picky eating at some point. While some outgrow it, others may remain in the phase for a long time, leaving parents at the end of their rope and out of ideas for how to get their child to eat better.

If you have a picky eater on your hands, you can take comfort in knowing you are not alone. This common frustration of parenting happens to just about every parent at some point.

Good Eaters Gone Bad

Most picky eaters don’t start out that way. Babies who ate anything put in front of them through the early stages of eating solids often take a turn for the picky side as they grow older. This is a normal part of development, and the effort that you put into providing a balanced children diet wasn’t in vain. A good eater will often go through a phase of picky eating and come out on the other side ready to eat again.

As children grow, their taste buds change and they change the way they feel about certain foods. Although many children still love sweets, the baby predisposition towards sweet will gradually fade as the palate starts to enjoy other flavors. While baby might make a face at a salty baby food, toddlers generally find salt quite enjoyable, as evidenced by their love of French fries.

Developing a sense of independence is also to blame for the changes in your previously good eater. Toddlers quickly come to realize that of the very few things they have any control of in their lives, eating is the one they can exert the most power over. They learn that there is really nothing you can do to make them eat what they don’t want to, and as part of learning to be independent, they will use this ability to find a sense of control over their environment. As independence develops and your child begins to feel more freedom over daily activities and actions, the picky eating may fade into the background.

Picky From the Start

Some children are simply picky eaters from day one. They never seem to develop an interest in many of the foods you offer and carry these habits over into toddlerhood and beyond. A consistently picky eater may well stay that way into adulthood without a great deal of effort on the part of the parents.

Some people merely have stronger taste buds than others and find certain flavors overwhelming. There are certain foods that it is very possible your child will never like. This doesn’t mean healthy eating isn’t possible, but merely that you will have to be a lot more creative.

One of the best advantages of the toddler years is that you can start to serve foods in much more interesting forms. Rather than bland purees, your child can now try all kinds of cuisine that will take the foods they might not like and flavor them in such as way as to make them more acceptable.

Dealing with a picky eater isn’t easy, but it certainly isn’t uncommon. Whether your child was picky from the start or developed the pickiness over time, there is always hope. Don’t give up on serving healthy foods. One day, your persistence will pay off.

Page 2 of 212