Here at Son Shine Kitchen, we love our desserts. But, at the same time, it’s also important to teach your children healthy eating habits. It all starts at home and starts with you as parents. Our boys are always in the kitchen, and always watching.
Today, I have a guest post for you from the wonderful Gabriel! He has put together a list of tips and ideas for healthy eating with your family. We already do some of this in our house, but I also learned a few things as well.
During the summer, kids may lounge at the refrigerator all day, using boredom as an excuse to eat more. However, that can be a problem. The CDC states that obesity prevalence for kids is nearly 14 percent for kids between the ages of 2 and 5 and over 18 percent for 6- to 11-year-olds!
Of course, it doesn’t have to be this way. Now is the perfect time to improve your family’s eating habits. Here’s how you can eat better before the summer is over.
What Foods Your Child Should Eat – and Avoid
Keeping children healthy and fit with the right foods is important, but food can also impact their brains and their mental health. Help your child avoid sugar, artificial sweeteners, artificial flavors and food dyes, and other processed foods. Instead, they should eat foods that will build their brains. This will help improve their focus, attention, mood, and sleep patterns and may also improve their mental health.
Psychology Today recommends these brain-building foods:
- Fatty fish and lean proteins like turkey and beans.
- Fresh produce, especially leafy greens.
- Nuts, dried fruit, hummus, nut butter, and granola for snacks.
- Fermented foods like sauerkraut and pickles.
It’s also important to eat foods that support your gut health, which is linked to everything from your immune system to your mood. Although this probably sounds complicated, it’s actually a lot easier than you might realize. For example, dark chocolate, pickles, yogurt, onions, and wild salmon are just a few of the foods you can add to your menu that will help improve the health of your gut.
Meal Planning
Meal planning allows you to ensure that your meals for the week meet some basic requirements:
- They contain the balanced nutrients your child needs.
- You can plan “quick” meals or leftovers for busy days.
- You have the budget for everything you need.
If you’re feeling intimidated, here is some advice on how to get organized. For example, you can keep a meal journal to give you inspiration going forward. Be sure that your family liked these recipes! Additionally, let your kids participate and select dishes they’d like to eat as well. You can always create a healthy version of what they like.
Let Your Children Shop
Bring your children to the grocery store. This is an important life skill for them to learn, and it will help them to understand how to make healthy choices. You can even give them a budget and allow them to choose the ingredients for the meal. Verywell Family has a list of learning activities to teach grocery shopping skills to kids of every age.
Meal Preparation
Once you have your meal plan and ingredients, you can do mass meal prep in one day. This will make life a lot easier for you. However, you must make sure you have enough containers for storage and space as well. Read these tips on how to get started from Meal Prep Haven.
It’s easy enough to get kids involved with meal prep if they have chopping or cutting skills. If not, there are other ways they can get involved in food prep. Little kids can mix and learn how to measure ingredients properly. Read this advice on how to teach your kids to cook by age.
Eat Together
Research has shown that eating together as a family often can lead to better grades, greater happiness, and better family relationships – and that is worth the effort! Read more at GoodNet.org.
It’s not hard to help your kids learn healthy eating habits. Allow them to join you in the supermarket, in the kitchen, and at the table, so they can learn life skills, understand how to make healthy choices, and avoid a health crisis as they grow up.
Gabriel Patel enjoys writing about health and wellness. He co-founded healthwellwise.com with a group of friends who share the desire to help people live happy, healthy lives.
This is great advice… I try and do all of these things but sadly eating together is impossible for us quite a lot of the time due to other commitments.
I know what you mean. When I was in high school, I was on the golf team so practice would often go until it got dark which meant my family usually finished dinner before me. We would try to eat together any nights I didn’t have practice and during the offseason. Sometimes, it just isn’t always possible!
Great tips! Have definitely been looking into nutrition for my little one!
It helps to start them early!
I really love all of these ideas. My favorite being meal-prepping. I just learned of this last year, and it seriously helped save time and money while in college. I also agree that eating together as a family is a practice that should be implemented in the home. I will never forget those times with my family and they are cherished forever.
I love meal-planning too. It helps save so much money, food, and time for me. And I agree, those times we all ate together were the best!
Everyone seems so busy today. I had all of my children in the kitchen with me when they were growing up. I enjoyed that time and am so glad that I could teach them how to prepare healthy meals for themselves and their families. A skill in which several of them had to teach their spouses.
That’s why I always have my boys in the kitchen, too. It’s such an important skill and something they’ll need their entire lives.
We took the decision yesterday to start eating healthy! This is really great and simple to follow, thank you so much.
It’s never too late to start!
These are such great tips. We always take our kids to the store with us and let them pick whatever fruit and veggies they want.
That’s awesome! My boys love to go grocery shopping with us, too.
One of my biggest memories is eating together as a family for dinner. It is definitely something I’ve continued as an adult!
Mine too. Sometimes we had the tv on (usually watching Gilmore Girls), and other times it was just us as a family.
I love to mass meal prep. I feel like it saves a lot of time and I also can plan what to cook in advance. Another thing that my family practices daily is to eat at least one meal together. But it’s only just me and my parents
Meal prep saves us so much time! And I feel like, no matter how many people are there, it’s great to eat a meal together.
I really love these tips! Planning out meals has helped my family save money and eat healthier, so its a win win! We always eat dinner as a family every night.
Dinner is the meal that we usually eat together, too. And breakfast most days, depending on what’s going on.
So far, my three year old isn’t a picky eater and eats what I eat. I eat (mostly) healthy so I hope he’s getting a good foundation.
That’s awesome! My boys can be so picky sometimes and it drives me crazy!
I’m due with my first in September and this was such helpful information to learn! Will definitely be serving my little one these foods!
Congratulations! The entire dynamic of mealtime changes drastically once you have kids involved but it’s great to start them on these healthy habits early.
I do try to let my child help with shopping, which makes sure she has something to eat. Just wish I could get her to think of more healthy options to try though. Would be so much better. But at this stage getting her to eat is the main challenge.
We usually let the boys each pick one snack, and the rest has to be fruit and veggies if they want to pick something out. That way they feel like they still get what they want, and we can limit the junk food.