alt=""/>Make only one meal, but include easy-to-eat foods. Include one or two foods that your child—and other eaters—generally eat and can fill up on, such as bread or fruit. Don’t worry if your child eats it and only it meal after meal, day after day. Eventually she will eat something different.
Include fat. Include fat when you cook, and make it available at mealtime to make food taste good. Fat with food also keeps everyone from getting hungry right away. Your toddler may eat butter as if it were cheese. That’s okay. She needs the calories.
Trust your child to eat. She wants to eat, she wants to learn to eat the food you eat, and she will tire of even her favorite food and eat something different. Sooner or later (maybe later rather than sooner) she will eat a variety.
Don’t take it personally. Food is love. But your family’s not eating the food you prepare isn’t the same as not accepting your love. Other family members love you back and eat what they enjoy.
Drinking and eating on the go
Keep your feeding goal in mind: Helping your child to be a competent eater, not getting-food-into-your-child right now. It doesn’t matter if the food or drink is nutritious, created especially for children, or even organic. Letting your child slurp and munch on the go will keep him from being a competent eater, and his nutrition will suffer. Just like other children, your child is likely to love eating and drinking wherever, whenever. But if you let him, expect this: He will have trouble knowing how much he needs to eat and may eat too little and grow too slowly or eat too much and grow too fast. He will behave poorly at family meals because he isn’t hungry and can’t be bothered. He won’t learn to eat the food you eat because his special food, delivered in his special way, is more to his liking.
Family meals are about family
If considering family meals puts you on a guilt trip and makes you feel overwhelmed, skip ahead to Have family-friendly meals. Especially read the section, “prepare food you enjoy.” Here is the bottom line: Family meals are first and foremost about family. They are not about food virtue: about providing only fresh-cooked food that earns a gold star from the food police.
Meals give a time and place to provide your child with food and reassure her she will be fed. You can pay attention and enjoy food when it is time to eat, then forget about it between times.
Meals let you conduct the business of the family, keep up with what is going on with everybody, help each other out, and tell family stories.
Meals teach your child how to behave at mealtime. That lets you enjoy her, and lets her be comfortable when she eats with other people.
Both you and your child eat better when you have family meals. You learn to enjoy a variety of food. Going to the meal hungry and eating until you get enough supports eating the amount you need and weighing what is right for you.
Children and teens who have regular family meals feel better about themselves, get along better with other people, and do better in school. Teens who have family meals are less likely to abuse drugs and have sex.
Meals are about family
You are a family when you take care of yourself. Whether your family numbers one or ten, whether you are related or a group of people living together, have family meals.
Sit-down snacks solve feeding problems
Planned, sit-down snacks are the ace in the hole of the beleaguered parent. When you know a sit-down snack is coming up in a couple of hours, you can say, “that’s it for now, snack time is coming soon.” You can say to your school-aged child, “snack time is now. Sit down and eat now, or you have to wait for dinner.” The planned snack solves these feeding problems:
Your child leaves the meal having eaten little or nothing. He is back 5 minutes later begging for food.
Your child has eaten well at the meal, but happens to think, “cookie,” and starts begging.
Your child did not eat much and seems okay with that, but you worry that he will not make it until the next meal.
Your child comes home famished, is too busy to take time to eat, and wants to munch along with other activities.
Your child eats constantly until dinner, in front of the TV or while doing homework.
Being able to recognize and understand your child’s stages in development lets you trust and enjoy her and parent in the best way. From 18 months through 6 years, she moves through being a toddler and then a preschooler and becomes an early school-age child. To identify her developmental stage, go by the description
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