Healthy Eating

Reflecting on Your View of Healthy Eating

Learning good food practices is a big part of the early years. This can easily be a challenging aspect of caregivers' work. There is often tension around healthy eating because of cultural norms around food and the health needs food meets.

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Our Neighborhood Holding Own Bottle Beyond Daycare

How do you manage your own habits as an adult? Do you use food as a reward, emotional comfort item, or a cultural ritual? Do you diet or over-indulge frequently?

What do you believe about food? Is there a food philosophy around carbs, fat, sugar, or protein that impacts your perception of foods?

How does your family experience shape your view of food? What impact does society, history, or the media play in your perception of what health food is, how much one should eat, and when one should eat?

We encourage children to eat; we do not ever withhold food to manipulate or punish children. Some days, children will be hungier, and other days, they will eat less. We want to support children to listen to their bodies while helping them learn to eat during meals and play during play.

Guide Children's Healthy Eating Habits

Within our trust for children, we must recognize their immature decision-making and own our responsibilities for supporting healthy eating. Children need our guidance in two crucial ways: designing an environment for healthy eating, thus creating a context for their learning, and coaching them to learn about food, nutrition, and their body. Caregivers play a crucial role in meeting children's needs for nutrition.

Trust Children

Research has shown when caregivers offer children healthy options during meal times, children will over time eat a balanced diet. Though caregivers may see toddlers eat just one kind of food or a seemingly unbalanced diet on an individual day, when the researchers looked over a week, they noticed even toddlers will eat a balanced diet if offered healthy options. We recommend children have a choice from what was packed or served, and if they eat what they choose, they will have eaten well for the day.

A healthy, well-balanced lunch box creates a "yes environment" in which children do not have unnecessary rules of eat this (yogurt) before this (cookie). Trusting children’s choices with food is a big part of helping them learn healthy habits. There will be hungry days and less hungry days; ultimately, adults cannot force a child to eat, so we must let go of how much and if children eat. Cajoling children to eat more of something or less of something else undermines their sense of trust and leads to many food battles. We can trust they will not starve themselves, and even better, when given the opportunity, they will make healthy choices.

Designing the Environment

Young children cannot manage time on their own; caregivers must set up appropriate mealtimes and play times to guide children to develop healthy eating habits. As an adult, you have a picture of the whole day and your child’s basic needs; thus, you can plan for regular meals and snacks to meet children’s needs for nutrition.

Caregivers establish guidelines around where food is consumed for the safety of children and the furniture. When children push against those guidelines, caregivers can kindly but firmly explain to children that they can choose to eat within the guidelines or be finished eating and eat again at the next meal or snack time. Children need our high expectations and a lot of support, coaching, and reminders to meet that expectation.

Determining what food is offered

Caregivers are also responsible for deciding what food to offer to children as this is not a decision that young children can make. We recommend offering children the food that the family eats; generally, offering two to five choices of foods and trying to plan at least one thing the child has enjoyed eating before works well. Research tells us that young children need to be introduced to a food ten times before they will know if they like or dislike it.

We recommend serving children very small portions so they are able to try things if they wish and ask for more if they would like. Picture a child’s stomach as about the size of their fist, and plan for them to eat about that much food total, so a few tablespoons of each choice is a good place to start. Caregivers will determine what food is offered and by presenting it in small portions, we support children to own their autonomy, to choose if they eat and how much, creating a "yes environment".

As we introduce diverse and healthy foods, it is important to consider how we prepare them to encourage children to eat them. A child’s palate is developing, so serving vegetables with cheese or dip can help children to begin exploring new foods. It will take time to develop an appreciation for diverse textures, tastes, and smells, so it doesn’t hurt to ease children into different foods. For treats and sweets, we recommend simply calling it “sometimes food”. We tell children it tastes good but doesn’t give our body much fuel. We don’t recommend making dessert conditional upon eating all of their food or some specific food.

Building children's food knowledge

Mealtime is a crucial time to build children’s knowledge around what healthy food is, the nutrients that are in food, how food helps our bodies, and the possible factors influencing food choices. The following are some examples of real words caregivers can use with children. We hope these phrases will provide a starting point for rich conversations.

Why do you think you like pizza so much, is it the chewy texture or the taste of the cheese, sauce, and bread all together?
Where did you get those cucumbers?
Let’s look in your lunch box and make sure you are making a mindful choice about not eating snack. If after you look at your choices you still don’t want to eat, you can skip it and wait until dinner.
You’re disappointed that you don’t have a squeezy. You have soft noodles or crunchy crackers, your choice.
This spinach is bright green! That color tells you it has lots of nutrients inside to help your body grow strong and healthy.
Check in with your belly... is it feeling full or still hungry?
There is so much to see it’s hard to focus on your bottle; I’m going to hold you so you can finish your bottle. Then, your belly will be full for more play.
It’s hard to stay sitting, but that’s part of staying safe while eating. Would you like me to rest my hand on your leg or hold your chair to remind you?