Teaching Your Toddler to Eat Healthy

Once your baby goes from infancy to the toddler stage, he will start to show more and more independence. It is important to encourage your child, but set limits. Unfortunately one of the first places a child usually asserts his independence is at the dinner table. Gone is the baby who ate everything, you now have a screaming toddler who refuses to eat anything healthy that you put in front of him.

One of the easiest ways that I get my toddler to go ahead and eat his vegetables is to cut them into fun shapes. If you are creative enough, you can do this with a knife. However, if you are like me, a cookie cutter through a cooked vegetable does a much better job. I also let my son pick out the shapes before we get started. Then he is excited about it. This method works well for vegetables like carrots, sweet potatoes, and just regular potatoes. The mini cookie cutters are the perfect size for a regular carrot.

Vegetables aren't the only thing we use cookie cutters for, though. When my son is in a particularly picky mood, or for special occasions, we will use the larger cookie cutters for sandwiches or bread. Fruits can also be done quite nicely. We just don't do them at our house very often because my son rarely needs any encouragement to eat plenty of fruit.

Another way you can try to get your toddler to eat healthy food is to let him pick part of the meal. For example, some days my son insists on a grilled cheese for lunch. I tell him he can have a grilled cheese, but he also needs to eat some corn or green beans, or whatever two veggies I choose. He gets to pick from the two, and then feels like he is picking his entire meal. That way I can usually get him to eat at least two bites of his vegetable before he insists that he is done.

We also have Elmo and Diego dishes that we use sometimes. If I ask Elliott if he wants some peas for lunch and he says no, he will often times agree to it if I say Elmo is having some, too. He doesn't use the dishes everyday, so they are a treat for him when he does. He also has Spongebob Squarepants snack bowls that get filled with healthy snacks and go in the diaper bag. My son will eat a few bites of about anything as long as he thinks that one of his favorite characters likes it, too.

Making his food appear pretty works sometimes, too. Some days we mix diced carrots, green beans, and peas all together. I then tell him how pretty the orange square carrots look with the green long beans and small round peas. He enjoys hearing about it and examining each one before he eats it. This also helps him learn more about shapes and colors.

One more way to encourage your child to eat healthy is to do so yourself. Your child watches and learns from what you do. If you always finish your vegetables, he will be more likely to at least take a few bites of his own.

There will still probably be days when your toddler refuses to eat his vegetables. As long as there are not several of these days in a row your child will be fine. Eating healthy is important, but if your toddler doesn't for a day or two, it's okay. Try one of these tricks and chances are your child will be eating normally again soon.