10 Things You Can Do to Make Your Kids Care About Good Food

In today’s world of fast, sugary, salty, fatty, prettily packaged and heavily marketed convenience food, convincing youngsters to eat healthy can seem like an uphill battle. But don’t give up! Kids can learn healthy eating habits and develop an appreciation for good, healthy food with these 10 tips.

1. Eat Good Food

Kids are awesome at modeling the behavior to which they are consistently exposed, so make sure you’re exposing them to good eating habits of your own. It’s especially important to guide kids’ food choices when they are young and developing. Yes, they may be resistant to finishing their broccoli, but if broccoli makes a regular appearance on their dinner plates, and in the family’s diets, they will grow up appreciating and understanding its value. A pantry stocked with healthy, nutritious food, and a family that eats healthy, nourishing meals, will become the norm and the standard they fall back on when they are old enough to make those decisions themselves, so be conscious of the foods in their world when they are young.

2. Explain the Benefits

Healthy food is awesome and powerful, so let your kids know it! Don’t just serve them a beautiful bowl of sweet, juicy blackberries; explain the blackberry’s hidden superpowers like vitamin C, and how important it is for them to fill their bodies with superhero foods so they can grow strong and smart!

3. Make the Food/Planet Connection

The modern availability of food, and the prevalence of ‘food science’ can create a distinct disconnection between what we eat and where it originates. Pickles don’t grow in jars, pizza is a multi-process meal, and many commercial snack foods don’t contain any real ingredients at all! It’s important for kids to understand where their food comes from and the various processes it undergoes, and how those processes affect the nutritional value, so why not open up a dialogue over the dinner table? Try playing a game of tracing the meal back to it’s beginning!

4. Make the Animal/Food Connection

It’s easy to forget that the pink, striped slab of bacon at the grocery store was once an intelligent, sentient being. But kids instinctively value all life, and don’t make the distinction that some animals are food until they are taught to do so. Breaking the food disconnect created by factory farming and the neat convenience of modern meat eating can be hard when they are inundated with it, but it is vital to do so to create not only conscious eaters, but also compassionate people! A discussion about where animal foods come from, why some people eat some animals but not others, and what animals who hunt look like versus what humans look like, can lead to some eye-opening and thought provoking conversations for both kids and parents alike.

5. Make Eating Fun

In addition to pointing out the superpowers of healthy foods, try making food fun by creating an art project. Create a broccoli forest home for a radish piglet to live! Serve up some Purple Monster Oatmeal or cut healthy sandwiches into fun, kid-friendly shapes. Get creative and have fun with food!

6. Involve Kids in Cooking

While you’re getting creative with fun food ideas, enlist the help of the creative little brains in your house! Not only does learning to cook develop valuable life skills, but cooking can create an important understanding and a connection with food. And it’s a great time to chat and bond with kids as well. Win, win!

7. Make the Illness/Food Connection

Yes, so blackberries are full of vitamin C and that builds strong bones, healthy skin and strong brains. But what does sugar do? Chemicals and additives? Fried fats? Even if you don’t have sugary, fatty and nutritionally-devoid foods in your home, kids are bound to come across them at school, or with friends. So it’s vital to discuss the good along with the bad. If your kids aren’t use to eating unhealthy, the change they experience when they try junk food for the first time may be quite noticeable. But if not, be sure kids know bad foods contribute to disease and poor health.

8. Garden

Nothing connects kids to food more than gardening! Even if kids are savvy about where good food comes from, getting their own hands in the dirt to plant, grow, harvest and eat food teaches kids so much more than just their connection to the earth and to their food. And every gardener can attest – food you grow yourself tastes all the better! Get kids in the garden and watch them beg to eat that broccoli right off the plant!

9. Get to Know Your Local Produce

Farmer’s markets can be fun and educational for kids. Not only are they packed with gorgeous local produce, but they are a great way to meet the local farmers in your community. Depending on when you are visiting the market, only certain foods may be available. Discussing local food and seasonal food with your children can increase their awareness of their ecological footprint, as well as give them an appreciation for foods that are available in their current environment. Many farms also allow self harvesting, which is another fun and educational way to connect kids to their local food community.

10. Use Food as Food

Most importantly, avoid using food as a reward or punishment! Of course a cookie will stop a temper tantrum in the grocery store, but what message does it relay to your child about food? And ultimately, that sugary cookie may be only a temporary fix anyhow, since there is a direct link between bad food and bad behavior. Teach kids that food is for nourishment, and their growing bodies are worth the best!

Image source: Phalinn Ooi/Flickr