One of the most essential tasks as a parent is to help your children develop a healthy relationship with food. Encourage them to eat right from the start, to enjoy trying new things, to love cooking. If they love food in all of its forms and understand innately where it comes from, they can make better, more informed decisions in the future. At the very least, enjoying a broad range of food and knowing how to cook delicious meals will give them a bump in life.
To help them develop such a relationship with their food, you are going to want to start today. With these tips, you will all eat better, healthier meals while having a great time bonding together.
Teach Them Where Food Comes From
Teaching your children where food comes from is one of the most important steps towards a healthy, more sustainable diet. You can do this by bringing them to farms, or even by growing your own food right at home.
Teach them about what foods are in season and consider making it a game. If your children know what is in season, why can eat fresher, more nutrient-rich food as standard.
Teach Them How to Cook
The next step is to teach them about cooking. Try to make healthy, in-season meals as much as you can. Teach them how to cook from scratch, how to reduce the amount of food waste, and how to prep meals in advance.
Expand Their Pallet
When they try something new, they need to try it more than once and prepared in more than one way. You can keep tabs on what they have tried so that they feel like they are in control, rather than you trying to trick them into eating something they don’t like again and again.
Teach Your Family About Mental Health
Even having a good relationship with food and knowing how to cook will not prevent your children from developing an unhealthy mindset towards it. Eating disorders and mental illnesses very rarely have anything to do with what you eat, and instead are about control, punishment, or are just a side effect from a comorbid issue.
Teach your children about mental illnesses and eating disorders, so that they also know what to look out for. If one of your children is struggling, as many children do once, they hit puberty, then get them professional help. Early aid from a center like edentreatment.com can help improve your child’s chances of a full recovery. Teach all of your children and stay up to date yourself so that you can take note of the early warning signs and get them the help they need. Most of those with eating disorders do hide it, so warning signs are often all you are going to get before their health becomes compromised.
A healthy relationship with food is both physical and mental. By teaching your children about food and how to cook, and by being aware of the risks of eating disorders and mental health, you can help them grow to be independent adults fully capable of maintaining a healthy diet and mind.
