Make Healthy Kids!

Kids and vegetables...Why is this such a NON Combination?  Why don't kids want to eat their vegetables?  And it seems that you want to get them started off right, so you avoid the chocolate, the pop, you feed them veggie baby food...They LOVE it...and then...they switch to real food...and NO WAY.  Green beans apparently lose a lot of flavor once they aren't smooshed up into baby foods.  So what kind of things CAN we do to make sure our kids start "getting the right idea" about what they are eating?

Don't Skip Breakfast-  Even if breakfast isn't the healthiest of meals, it still shows that students score higher on short term memory and verbal fluency and other academic related activities, if they eat breakfast.  If you can choose something quick, like a bowl of cereal, a cup of yogurt, or even a microwaveable breakfast...It's better than no breakfast at all. These ideas take just a few minutes.

Plant a Garden or Let Kids Choose Veggies for their meals-  Giving kids the ability to choose what they want to eat is kind of a power play.  If you go to the store, ask them what vegetable they want for supper tonight, they'll eat what they choose.  If you have the ability to grow a garden, get the kids involved in the planting process.  It's great together time.  I still remember when my youngest son Mason and I opened a fresh pea pod from the garden.  We ate it right there on the spot, and his eyes gleamed with excitement!  We grew these delicious little morsels.   He still likes peas, by the way.

Forget Force Feeding and Cleaning Your Plate-  I know that we were all taught it was good manners to clean our plates...every last drop.  But it's not the healthiest thing to be teaching our children.  Healthy kids should eat until they feel full, and they typically know how much that is...It's a lot less than what you might think!  You forcing them to eat, will teach them to keep eating, and ignore their bodies natural ability to tell them when to stop.

Turn Off The TV At Suppertime?

Since the 1970's, the number of television ads aimed at kids has doubled to about 40,000 per year, and studies are suggesting that the amount of time kids watch TV is a strong predictor of how often they request specific foods.  The bad news is most of those ads promote junk food; Food that has absolutely NO nutritional value.  So make a solution:  Push your kids outside... shovel them out into the snow if it's warm enough. Getting them away from the tube and outdoors, typically means increasing exercising, and decreasing a lot of bad stuff, like obesity, heart disease, and boredom!  This is a tough one for me, where I work a lot.  But it's worth it in the long run.  Get those cuties outside...It's for their benefit, even if they fight you on it!