Make Food Fun: Creative Ways to Get Your Preschooler to Eat

If you are a parent of a preschooler, you know that children in this age group can be picky eaters. My daughter is very slender for her age and we've had to come up with creative ways to get her to eat. I wanted to share some of the helpful tools to get your child to eat.

One of the easiest ways we encouraged our daughter to eat is to get her involved in the preparation of foods. If I am making rice for dinner, I let my daughter use a measuring cup to measure the water and rice. Even allowing her to help in small ways seems to peak her interest in eating. I will also allow her to chop soft foods with a butter knife and a cutting board. We also heap on lots of praise and tell her that the food is so good because she helped make it!

Another way we have helped my daughter to eat better is to make food fun. We cut all sandwiches into fun shapes with cookie cutters. You can use cookie cutters for much more than cookies. We use them to shape pieces of cheese, fruit and pancakes. Another way to make food fun for your preschool child is to arrange it in a special way. You can make faces, flowers or in the shape of a letter. The possibilities are endless! Using that same idea, you can come up with more child friendly names for foods. In our house, Broccoli is known as "trees" and string beans are called "Jack's beanstalks". Our daughter willingly eats both of these foods because we have made them a bit more fun!

One of the last ways to get your picky eater to eat is to change the environment. Consider using a favorite colored plate, or a cup with your child's favorite character on it. You could get crafty and allow your child to make her own place mat using contact paper. You could allow your child to help you set the table, selecting which seat she would like. For lunches, I often host a pretend picnic. We spread out a blanket o the floor and pretend we are having a picnic. My daughter thinks it is so much fun. We've found that sometimes if you give you child control of these small details, they will eat willingly!

Although getting my daughter to eat and eat healthy is still a challenge, a bit of creativity can go along way to improve the situation. Hopefully some of these ideas will help you, if you are the parent of a picky eater!