Healthy Eating for Toddlers

Due to food allergies from the time of her birth, my daughter Larkin has always had a different palate than most toddlers. From an early age, she learned to enjoy sweet potatoes, butternut squash and rice. With teeth, she moved on to olives, pickles, various fruits and most meats.

When Larkin's little brother Kadin came along, and it became apparent that he did not suffer from food allergies, we went hog wild, so to speak, with what we fed him. Freed from the necessity of making homemade baby food from fresh ingredients, Kadin had the opportunity to try every pre-made baby food on the market and solidly settled on fruits and desserts from a jar as his preferred meals.

He was given ice cream, French fries to gum until he could chew them, and a host of other junk foods that were completely off limits for Larkin. I will never forget his sheer joy when digging in to his first birthday cake, and then the panic as his fingers began to stick together from the icing. Larkin's first birthday was celebrated with a sugar free fruit juice Popsicle and the introduction of vanilla-flavored rice milk.

As Kadin got teeth and graduated to mostly solid foods, I noticed a distinct difference between my 3 year old and my 16 month old. While Larkin would sit down to a lunch of rice, turkey, corn and no sugar added applesauce, Kadin would be indulging in macaroni and cheese with a side of potato chips.

It didn't take me long to realize that, although my food choices for Kadin were somewhat freeing and certainly less labor intensive, they were not setting him up for good eating patterns later in life. Would he come to know the joy of eating pickles and bananas for a snack, as his sister had, or would he settle for nothing less than chocolate chip cookies with chocolate milk to wash them down?

Experts agree that the first few years of a child's life are crucial for learning healthy eating and nutrition habits, and that these habits instilled at an impressionable time in a child's development, can last a lifetime.

Like many parents, I had read many of the articles detailing the importance of teaching a diverse palate and good eating habits, but the ease of 'kiddie' junk food and the desire to feed those things to Kadin just because I could, often overrode the message of the article. It took a friendly stranger's offhand comment about my daughter sitting at Olive Garden chewing down black olives and broccoli while Kadin and I downed one breadstick after another, for the light bulb to really come on for me.

Although Larkin had been forced to eat foods that would be unusual for many young toddlers and children, she learned to enjoy them, even as her diet became less restrictive. It made perfect sense to me that, just like the articles said, Kadin, too, would learn to like and prefer whatever I put in front of him, whether it was chocolate snack cakes or string cheese and apple slices.

Kadin and Larkin now eat basically the same meals and snacks, although Kadin is able to add cheese and yogurt to his repertoire of snacks. Larkin's food allergies and accompanying eczema are hard to endure at times, but in some moments, the experiences we've had with her as a baby and toddler illuminate and crystallize those things that pediatricians and children's advocates are trying to get across to tired, information-inundated parents.

Kadin will, in large part, have Larkin to thank for avoiding bad eating habits and the plethora of accompanying problems like childhood obesity, because she proved to us that children will indeed eat and like what you put in front of them most often.