Developing Healthy Eating Habits...

In Your Baby and Toddler

 
The first 2 years of life is the best time to begin developing healthy eating habits in your young child. Here are some suggestions to lay the foundation for a lifetime of healthy eating.
 
 
1. Feed your baby when she is hungry. This might seem like common sense, but many parenting books advise you to put young babies on strict feeding schedules. Feeding your baby when she is hungry is vitally important to your baby's physical and emotional health. Forcing your baby to wait more than a few minutes creates needless anxiety and frustration, both for you and your baby.
 
 
2. Learn to read your baby's body language. Through trial and error you will learn which of your baby's cries mean hunger, and which cries mean that something else is wrong. Your baby may also use her body language to tell you that she has had enough milk to drink. Turning her head away, pulling away from the nipple and keeping her mouth closed can all signal that she is full.
 
 
3. Make loving contact with your baby as you feed him. Feeding your baby provides you with the opportunity to nurture and love him. Make feeding time a loving and pleasant time that your baby will look forward to by holding him, making eye contact, talking & even singing to him.
 
 
4. Feed your baby cereal with a spoon. A baby can control the intake of cereal better when she is eating from a spoon rather than drinking it from a bottle. She also needs to learn to eat and swallow using a spoon. If she isn't ready to eat from a spoon then she probably isn't ready to eat solids yet.
 
 
5. Introduce new foods slowly. Add foods one at a time and wait a few days in before introducing a new one. This allows you to see how your baby responds to each new food individually. If your baby has eaten several new foods at the same time and then later gets a running tummy or breaks out in a rash, it will be hard to know which food was the cause.
 
 
6. When possible, feed your baby the same food as the rest of the family. The sooner you do this, the more readily your child will eat what everyone else eats as he grows older. He won't feel that family meals are strange and foreign because he'll be accustomed to eating them from an early age.
 
 
Many parents spend enormous amounts of effort to prepare special meals for their children well into the second year, when this isn't necessary and may even be counterproductive.

There are probably many things in most meals that can be mashed for babies to eat. Carrots, potatoes, rice, squash, plain noodles and other soft ingredients can all be mashed easily and fed to your baby without any additional work for you.
 
 
7. Expect and plan for a mess. Young children will create a mess when they eat. That's inevitable. Set up an eating environment that's easy to clean. This allows you to focus on your child and the meal, rather than on preventing the inevitable mess from occurring. You could roll up rugs, lay out an old shower curtain, line the area around baby's high chair with newspaper, wear a big apron or feed your baby outside if the weather permits.
 
Developing healthy eating habits in your child isn't all that difficult. And your child will develop healthy habits that will last a lifetime.

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