Healthy eating habits for preschoolers

Nourish your child with a wide variety of healthy foods chosen from all major food groups. Many preschool-age children are picky eaters, unwilling to taste unfamiliar food. Even if your child always refuses to eat unfamiliar foods, continue to offer new foods as an option with meals. Children usually try them once they become familiar.

Suggestions to expand your child's food choices:

• Find at least one food from each food group that your child likes and make sure it is readily available most of the time. Do not worry if your child likes only one vegetable or one or two kinds of meats or fruits. Children tend to accept new foods gradually, and their preferences expand over time.
• Model good nutrition for your children. If you do not want your child to eat less nutritious foods (for example, those that contain high amounts of fats or sugar), do not have them in the house. If you eat these foods but try to keep them away from your preschooler, the child will learn to sneak these foods, beg for them, or view them as highly desirable.
• Avoid giving your child juice or restrict the amount to no more than 4 fl oz (118.3 mL) a day. Also, look at juice labels. Many beverages sold as juice are mostly water and sugar and contain only a little juice. Even in drinks that are high in juice, fruit juice does not have the valuable fiber that whole fruit has. Fiber is an important part of a balanced diet.

Suggestions to help you avoid battles about food:

• Provide a variety of nutritious foods for your child, at reasonably timed meals in a proper meal environment—a family gathering place where meals are shared.
• Within the boundaries of what you make available, let your child decide what and how much to eat. Help your child learn to eat when he or she is hungry and stop when he or she full. Don't let rules, pleading, or bargaining dictate your child's eating patterns.
• Do not combine rewards with food and eating. That is, don't use favorite foods as rewards for good behavior, and do not reward desired eating behavior (such as finishing a plate of food or trying a new food). If you serve dessert, consider it part of the meal, not a treat to follow the main course.
• Consider family meals to be pleasant social events that bring the family together, not functional events where a child feels obligated to eat.
• Although it is important to monitor the general amounts and types of food your child eats, be careful of going overboard trying to control and monitor every morsel consumed. Children easily pick up on your anxieties. Eating can become emotionally charged rather than a natural response to hunger. This can increase children's risk of developing eating disorders later in life.

In general, nutrition is not a problem if a child is growing, active, and appears healthy. Nutrition may be a problem for a child who is not growing normally. Talk with your health professional if you have concerns.