All family members should eat varied and healthy diet. Proper combinations of vitamins, minerals and other nutritious substances could provide a balance to ensure our health. Food can be seen as a window of opportunity to maintain our quality of life. Healthy babies are born to healthy mothers. However, toddlers and young children often have eating problems. After being breastfed, young children will need to get very healthy diet. If toddlers start to develop into fussy eaters, it is important for parents to start taking the real steps. Here are things that they should do:
- Don’t rely on puree: Find out when children could start eating solid food. Consult with paediatrician and child nutritionists to know when children could start eating real food. Solid food is generally taste better than puree, due to more intact flavour and better texture. If children start to eat solid foods, it is likely that they will be ready to eat more types of foods. They will be glad to try to taste the flavour of each individual fruit. This would be a new experience for them, because mixed fruit juice tends to have confusing flavour. Children could also be given wholegrains, such as quinoa, amaranth and couscous. Even if toddlers still have undeveloped teeth, they can still eat mashed foods, which still have texture compared to puree.
- Allow them to get messy: Children can’t eat neatly and being messy is actually part of the learning process. When you give toddlers diced banana or avocado, it is likely that it will spill and causing a mess. You shouldn’t rush it and try to instruct children calmly how to reduce mess gradually. Make sure that the learning process is fun and exciting. Make any milestone as an achievement that can be celebrated, no matter how trivial and small it is. For the learning process, getting messy is always a good thing for your children.
- Introduce simpler, individual tastes: Children often refuse to eat puree and mixed fruit juice, because they taste uninteresting. In reality, simple taste could be more interesting. Young children love to explore new things and they will be glad to acquire new taste. As an example, the subtle taste of avocado can be introduced to children. Add a bit of sugar or honey, then ask whether children enjoy it. When you add a new element to the food, make sure that you ask your children first. After your children understand each individual taste from different kinds of food, they will voluntarily experiment. Allow them to be creative in mixing taste, until they come up with something that they really like.
Limit milk intake: Milk is very nutritious, but it doesn’t give children a complete nutrition. Many parents rely too much on breastfeeding or formula milk. If you can start to reduce milk consumption, then you start to do that. Introduce something tasty that provide children with plenty of nutritional values. As children grow older, milk should become only complimentary foods.