FEEDING TODDLERS: 17 TIPS FOR PLEASING THE PICKY EATER
When our first few children were toddlers, we dreaded dinnertime. We would
prepare all kinds of sensible meals composed of what we thought were healthy,
appealing foods. Most of these offerings would end up splattering the
high-chair tray and carpeting the floor. To make matters worse, we took our
kids' rejection of our cuisine personally, sure that this was a sign of
parental lapse on our part. What was wrong? Why were these kids such picky
eaters?
Why toddlers are picky. Being a picky eater is part of what it means to be a
toddler. We have since learned that there are developmental reasons why kids
between one and three years of age peck and poke at their food. After a year of
rapid growth (the average one-year-old has tripled her birth weight), toddlers
gain weight more slowly. So, of course, they need less food. The fact that
these little ones are always on the go also affects their eating patterns. They
don't sit still for anything, even food. Snacking their way through the day is
more compatible with these busy explorers' lifestyle than sitting down to a
full-fledged feast.
Learning this helped us relax. We now realize that our job is simply to buy the
right food, prepare it nutritiously (steamed rather than boiled, baked rather
than fried), and serve it creatively. We leave the rest up to the kids. How
much they eat, when they eat, and if they eat is mostly their responsibility;
we've learned to take neither the credit nor the blame.
Toddlers like to binge on one food at a time. They may eat only fruits one day,
and vegetables the next. Since erratic eating habits are as normal as toddler
mood swings, expect your child to eat well one day and eat practically nothing
the next. Toddlers from one to three years need between 1,000 and 1,300
calories a day, yet they may not eat this amount every day. Aim for a
nutritionally-balanced week, not a balanced day.
All this is not to say that parents shouldn't encourage their toddlers to eat
well and develop healthy food habits. Based on our hands-on experience with
eight children, we've developed 17 tactics to tempt little taste buds and
minimize mealtime hassles.
1. Offer a nibble tray. Toddlers like to graze their way through a variety of
foods, so why not offer them a customized smorgasbord? The first tip from the
Sears' kitchen is to offer toddlers a nibble tray. Use an ice-cube tray, a
muffin tin, or a compartmentalized dish, and put bite-size portions of colorful
and nutritious foods in each section. Call these finger foods playful names
that a two-year-old can appreciate, such as:
a.. apple moons (thinly sliced)
b.. avocado boats (a quarter of an avocado)
c.. banana wheels
d.. broccoli trees (steamed broccoli florets)
e.. carrot swords (cooked and thinly sliced)
f.. cheese building blocks
g.. egg canoes (hard- boiled egg wedges)
h.. little O's (o-shaped cereal)
Place the food on an easy-to-reach table. As your toddler makes his rounds
through the house, he can stop, sit down, nibble a bit, and, when he's done,
continue on his way. These foods have a table-life of an hour or two.
NUTRITIP: Good Grazing - Good Behavior
A child's demeanor often parallels her eating patterns. Parents often
notice that a toddler's behavior deteriorates toward the end of the morning or
mid-afternoon. Notice the connection? Behavior is at its worst the longer they
go without food. Grazing minimizes blood-sugar swings and lessens the resulting
undesirable behavior.
2. Dip it. Young children think that immersing foods in a tasty dip is pure fun
(and delightfully messy). Some possibilities to dip into:
a.. cottage cheese or tofu dip
b.. cream cheese
c.. fruit juice-sweetened preserves
d.. guacamole
e.. peanut butter, thinly spread
f.. pureed fruits or vegetables
g.. yogurt, plain or sweetened with juice concentrate
Those dips serve equally well as spreads on apple or pear slices, bell-pepper
strips, rice cakes, bagels, toast, or other nutritious platforms.
3. Spread it. Toddlers like spreading, or more accurately, smearing. Show them
how to use a table knife to spread cheese, peanut butter, and fruit concentrate
onto crackers, toast, or rice cakes.
4. Top it. Toddlers are into toppings. Putting nutritious, familiar favorites
on top of new and less-desirable foods is a way to broaden the finicky
toddler's menu. Favorite toppings are yogurt, cream cheese, melted cheese,
guacamole, tomato sauce, applesauce, and peanut butter.
5. Drink it. If your youngster would rather drink than eat, don't despair. Make
a smoothie - together. Milk and fruit - along with supplements such as juice,
egg powder, wheat germ, yogurt, honey, and peanut butter - can be the basis of
very healthy meals. So what if they are consumed through a straw? One note of
caution: Avoid any drinks with raw eggs or you'll risk salmonella poisoning.
6. Cut it up. How much a child will eat often depends on how you cut it. Cut
sandwiches, pancakes, waffles, and pizza into various shapes using cookie
cutters.
7. Package it. Appearance is important. For something new and different, why
not use your child's own toy plates for dishing out a snack? Our kids enjoy the
unexpected and fanciful when it comes to serving dishes - anything from plastic
measuring cups to ice-cream cones.
You can also try the scaled-down approach. Either serve pint-size portions or,
when they're available, buy munchkin-size foodstuffs, such as mini bagels, mini
quiches, chicken drummettes (the meat part of the wing), and tiny muffins.
8. Become a veggie vendor. I must have heard, "Doctor, he won't eat his
vegetables" a thousand times. Yet, the child keeps right on growing. Vegetables
require some creative marketing, as they seem to be the most contested food in
households with young children. How much vegetables do toddlers need? Although
kids should be offered three to five servings of veggies a day, for children
under five, each serving need be only a tablespoon for each year of age. In
other words, a two- year-old should ideally consume two tablespoons of
vegetables three to five times a day. So if you aren't the proud parent of a
veggie lover, try the following tricks:
a.. Plant a garden with your child. Let her help care for the plants, harvest
the ripe vegetables, and wash and prepare them. She will probably be much more
interested in eating what she has helped to grow.
b.. Slip grated or diced vegetables into favorite foods. Try adding them to
rice, cottage cheese, cream cheese, guacamole, or even macaroni and cheese.
Zucchini pancakes are a big hit at our house, as are carrot muffins.
c.. Camouflage vegetables with a favorite sauce.
d.. Use vegetables as finger foods and dip them in a favorite sauce or dip.
e.. Using a small cookie cutter, cut the vegetables into interesting shapes.
f.. Steam your greens. They are much more flavorful and usually sweeter than
when raw.
g.. Make veggie art . Create colorful faces with olive- slice eyes, tomato
ears, mushroom noses, bell-pepper mustaches, and any other playful features you
can think of. Our eighth child, Lauren, loved to put olives on the tip of each
finger. "Olive fingers" would then nibble this nutritious and nutrient-dense
food off her fingertips. Zucchini pancakes make a terrific face to which you
can add pea eyes, a carrot nose, and cheese hair.
h.. Concoct creative camouflages. There are all kinds of possible variations
on the old standby "cheese in the trees" (cheese melted on steamed broccoli
florets). Or, you can all enjoy the pleasure of veggies topped with peanut-
butter sauce, a specialty of Asian cuisines.
9. Share it. If your child is going through a picky-eater stage, invite over a
friend who is the same age or slightly older whom you know "likes to eat." Your
child will catch on. Group feeding lets the other kids set the example.
10. Respect tiny tummies. Keep food servings small. Wondering how much to
offer? Here's a rule of thumb - or, rather, of hand. A young child's stomach is
approximately the size of his fist. So dole out small portions at first and
refill the plate when your child asks for more. This less-is-more meal plan is
not only more successful with picky eaters, it also has the added benefit of
stabilizing blood-sugar levels, which in turn minimizes mood swings. As most
parents know, a hungry kid is generally not a happy kid.
Use what we call "the bite rule" to encourage the reluctant eater: "Take one
bite, two bites." (how ever far you think you can push it without
force-feeding). The bite rule at least gets your child to taste a new food,
while giving her some control over the feeding. As much as you possibly can,
let your child - and his appetite - set the pace for meals. But if you want
your child to eat dinner at the same time you do, try to time his snack-meals
so that they are at least two hours before dinner.
11. Make it accessible. Give your toddler shelf space. Reserve a low shelf in
the refrigerator for a variety of your toddler's favorite (nutritious) foods
and drinks. Whenever she wants a snack, open the door for her and let her
choose one. This tactic also enables children to eat when they are hungry, an
important step in acquiring a healthy attitude about food.
12. Use sit-still strategies. One reason why toddlers don't like to sit still
at the family table is that their feet dangle. Try sitting on a stool while
eating. You naturally begin to squirm and want to get up and move around.
Children are likely to sit and eat longer at a child-size table and chair where
their feet touch the ground.
13. Turn meals upside down. The distinctions between breakfast, lunch, and
dinner have little meaning to a child. If your youngster insists on eating
pizza in the morning or fruit and cereal in the evening, go with it - better
than her not eating at all. This is not to say that you should become a
short-order cook, filling lots of special requests, but why not let your
toddler set the menu sometimes? Other family members will probably enjoy the
novelty of waffles and hash browns for dinner.
14. Let them cook. Children are more likely to eat their own creations, so,
when appropriate, let your child help prepare the food. Use cookie cutters to
create edible designs out of foods like cheese, bread, thin meat slices, or
cooked lasagna noodles. Give your assistant such jobs as tearing and washing
lettuce, scrubbing potatoes, or stirring batter. Put pancake batter in a
squeeze bottle and let your child supervise as you squeeze the batter onto the
hot griddle in fun shapes, such as hearts, numbers, letters, or even spell the
child's name.
15. Make every calorie count. Offer your child foods that pack lots of
nutrition into small doses. This is particularly important for toddlers who are
often as active as rabbits, but who seem to eat like mice.
Nutrient-dense foods that most children are willing to eat include:
a.. Avocados
b.. Pasta
c.. Broccoli
d.. Peanut butter
e.. Brown rice and other grains
f.. Potatoes
g.. Cheese
h.. Poultry
i.. Eggs
j.. Squash
k.. Fish
l.. Sweet potatoes
m.. Kidney beans
n.. Tofu
o.. Yogurt
16. Count on inconsistency. For young children, what and how much they are
willing to eat may vary daily. This capriciousness is due in large part to
their ambivalence about independence, and eating is an area where they can act
out this confusion. So don't be surprised if your child eats a heaping plateful
of food one day and practically nothing the next, adores broccoli on Tuesday
and refuses it on Thursday, wants to feed herself at one meal and be totally
catered to at another. As a parent in our practice said, "The only thing
consistent about toddler feeding is inconsistency." Try to simply roll with
these mood swings, and don't take them personally.
17. Relax. Sometime between her second and third birthday, you can expect your
child to become set in her ideas on just about everything - including the way
food is prepared. Expect food fixations . If the peanut butter must be on top
of the jelly and you put the jelly on top of the peanut butter, be prepared for
a protest. It's not easy to reason with an opinionated two-year-old. Better to
learn to make the sandwich the child's way. Don't interpret this as being
stubborn. Toddlers have a mindset about the order of things in their world. Any
alternative is unacceptable. This is a passing stage.
sumber : http://www.askdrsears.com/html/3/T030800.asp#T031200
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