Creating Healthy Food Habits to Build a Healthy, Happy Family

Small children go through the age where they explore their world through their senses. Build a healthy family through proper nutrition which improves the functioning of these senses, but these senses also need constant stimulation to develop to their full potential.
Food are also used as an education tool, as all children have an inherent need to tough and play with things, which is a great way to improve their hand-eye coordination. Of course this does mean a certain amount of mess but your home has probably already been turned upside down any number of times with small children. You may not be able to upgrade you home into a self cleaning home, but you sure can upgrade your child’s eating habits to build a healthy happy family. By offering nutritious healthy meals to your children is not the problem at all, getting them to eat it is the real challenge.
Parents can oftentimes be too forceful when wanting to exert some control over their child’s diet. It is therefore important that you do not pressure your child too much in order to prevent the rebel in your child from taking over. And you’d better believe it is easier said than done for sure. There are a couple of important rules to keep in mind when you try to convince your little darlings to try and eat new healthier food in order to build a healthy family. These rules are based on the principle of changing the food and meal culture within your entire household, so everyone will have to make some changes to build a healthy family.
Find the time for family meals, the importance of this special time the family spend together cannot be overemphasized. The number of meals that a family enjoys together is slowly declining, as more and more people are making use of convenience foods due to a lack of time, and families are eating their meals in front of the TV. This takes the all important emphasis off the food and the family. Instead of using our sense optimally, we defeat them by focusing on whatever program is intruding our family meal time. More frequent family meals have been associated with a higher intake of complex carbohydrates, protein, calcium, iron, vitamin A, vitamin B complex, vitamin C and vitamin E.
The benefits of breakfast may seem overrated. It is for a fact, the most important meal of the day. Breakfast can cure many things, from an empty stomach to grumpiness, irritability and tiredness. Another very interesting thing, children are more inclined to eat breakfast if they had a family meal the previous night. Breakfast is one of the most difficult meals to get a child to eat. Give your child a choice by giving them a list of healthy breakfast options to choose from and allow them to determine the serving size as well. Any start is a good start to build a healthy happy family.
Make small gradual changes. Once parents have made the decision to change the current family lifestyle, they tend to jump in head first. Then only afterwards they realize they have mistaken the shallow end for the deep end. Then chaos breaks loose and everything just backfires. Rather decide with foods will be allowed, and which will be eliminated. The foods that you have on your eliminated list, then needs to be excluded slowly, without them even really realizing. But children are very perceptive, they probably will notice the changes and they may even rebel against your plans to build a healthy family.
May of us have fallen prey to the supermarket snare, as most supermarkets are full of tempting and attractive packaged foods. Most of these are also designed to target specifically children. These foods seem to be far more attractive and enticing when a child is hungry, and this goes for adults too. Have you ever noticed that public places, especially supermarkets are the most common arena for food warfare? Therefore be a little cleverer, before attempting the very courageous act of grocery shopping, make sure the kiddies are not starving and are fairly full and well fed. Give them something healthy to eat before visiting the supermarket.
With your children avoid using food as a reward; even though it is one of the most successful ways to reward a child, it is certainly not ideal when you want to build a healthy family. We all know that there is nothing better can a special treat to keep a child quite and happy and behaved, but this act of love from our side only creates unhealthy eating habits. Some studies have also shown that using food as a reward to change unwanted behavior increases the risk of developing obesity and other lifestyle diseases later in life. This kind of food reward system prevents your child from regulating his or her own food intake.
Then you think about playing with food, the first thing that comes to mind is a slap on the hand and a clear order not to play with food. But playing with food and also helping with cooking exposes your child to various textures and actions regarding food. Most young children and toddlers do not really know the difference between playing for fun and playing for educations. When they are capable to use a big spoon, allow them to dish pasta or rice into smaller containers, let them stir and mix food together. For example give them yoghurt and let them mix raisins and fruit and honey into it for breakfast. After all, play is the best teacher for small children and will also help you to build a healthy happy family.
Although the above advice may be hard to implement, but do persevere. No all children accept change easily, so just hang in there and if all else fails, run!