Editor’s Note: This story ran in Town&Gown’s Parenting 2017 insert.
Children are always watching, especially in their earliest years. They learn by observing their parents — processing and copying sounds and behaviors. They become miniature mimes — mimicking the words they hear, the gestures they see, and even the food choices their parents make.
It’s possible that these food choices can impact children before birth. According to Kathleen Keller, Mark T. Greenberg Early Career Professor for Children’s Health and Development and assistant professor in the departments of nutritional science and food science at Penn State, flavors can be passed to a baby through the mother’s amniotic fluid and through breast-feeding. She encourages parents to make healthy choices for themselves as early in their children’s lives as possible.
“It’s actually protective to expose the child to the flavors that are going to be available to eat during the family’s life so that when the child is born they have foods that will be acceptable to them,” she says. “The sooner that you can start these exposures, the more likely it is that the child is going to become familiar with the foods and be able to eat them throughout their lives.”
She believes that children are very susceptible to forming habits, good or bad. If they are exposed to healthy habits by their parents, it’s more likely that they will keep those habits in their teenage and adult years. If children are exposed to bad habits, these also can continue into later life, as they are extremely hard to break.
With all this in mind, parents should ask themselves, “What’s on my plate?” and expose their children to healthy eating habits as early as possible.
Parents can begin to introduce babies to healthy eating options as soon as they begin to eat solid-type foods. Keller says it is up to parents whether they choose to begin with pureed, prepackaged baby food, or regular table food prepared in ways babies can handle, such as mashed or cooked and cut appropriately.
Either way, she says some of the table foods parents can first introduce their children to are larger cut pieces of fruit such as bananas or avocados, or vegetables such as slightly steamed broccoli or large-cut pieces of squash.
“Those tend to be good foods to start with because they are easy to pick up and children can munch on them,” she says. “Those kinds of foods are good because they are soft and kids can pick them up and manage them.”
Chelsea Kraus, a mother from Bellefonte, says her son, Gavin, is a good eater and foods like those Keller mentioned are among his favorites. At 1 ½ years old, Gavin loves raspberries, strawberries, bananas, and bread.
Kraus believes introducing Gavin to healthy food options from a young age is very important to his overall health.
“This way he’s accustomed and has a healthy diet from the beginning,” she says, “this can help with his eating choices as he grows and help to keep him healthy.”
Like Kraus, Marie Laird of State College, thinks introducing fruit and vegetable options to her 1-year-old son, Chase, is crucial to starting healthy eating habits.
“It’s important because it becomes a norm instead of trying to make changes later in life,” she says.
Both Kraus and Laird say they present healthy food options to Gavin and Chase in similar ways to what they serve the rest of the family unit. Keller encourages other parents to do the same, as it introduces children to how they will eat for the rest of their childhood.
“People worry about serving herbs and spices to kids or serving them things that are going to be really strong. Little bits and tastes of foods that are going to be part of the family culture and part of the family table are appropriate for kids to have,” Keller says.
She believes including young children in preparing and cooking of meals and in family dinner time are two of the most important things parents can do to promote healthy eating. Kitchen and mealtime involvement allows parents to model how and why children should eat healthy food options.
“Kids really have to see you eating things and enjoying and experiencing them. That really makes them want to do it as well,” she says.
In addition to being a time to set good eating examples, family mealtime also has a protective element, Keller says. It allows children to see parents working out family problems, talking, and dealing with things in a rational way.
Parents can often struggle with introducing new foods to their children, and Keller believes that involving children in food preparation can make it easier. Picky eating can be a common issue that parents face, especially when presenting children with a food they’ve never previously eaten.
Kraus says to help with potential pickiness, she and her husband “try” new foods with Gavin.
“I may sing and try to be enthusiastic about him trying the foods. When he sees us try them and saying ‘yummy,’ this helps add to his excitement,” she says.
Laird says she will often introduce new, healthy foods with something that Chase already knows and likes.
“He likes cheese, so when I introduce new vegetables, I serve them with little cubes of cheese. I also mix new ingredients with foods that I know he likes. When I introduced him to spinach, it was still difficult for him to eat it, so I pureed it and made scrambled eggs,” she says.
Laird also makes Chase muffins with vegetables and fruits such as zucchini, carrots, spinach, blueberries, raisins, and pumpkins, while using natural sweeteners such as honey or applesauce. This allows Laird to introduce new foods to Chase in a way that looks familiar to him.
Like Kraus, Laird and her husband also make sure Chase sees them eating and enjoying the newly introduced foods. She says smiling and making “mmm” noises makes him more excited and more likely to eat new foods.
Keller likes to remind parents that picky eating is a perfectly normal stage that kids go through and usually starts around 18 months, just as children are becoming more mobile. She says there is a theory that this may be due to a protective factor from a hunter-gatherer standpoint.
“Right around the time that children would be able to walk away from their mother, it’s not really a good idea for them to ingest or pick up a bunch of berries or things that might be strange,” she says. “There is a thought that perhaps they develop [pickiness] to prevent taking something that might be bad for them.”
She also reminds parents not to be too difficult on themselves. Whether it’s due to busy schedules or childhood pickiness, not every meal will always meet the requirements of MyPlate, the current nutrition guide published by the United States Department of Agriculture. MyPlate depicts a table place setting that is divided into the five food groups. If meals are missing a food group or two, Keller says that’s perfectly okay.
A few things she has found helpful to combat this are cooking big meals on the weekend to use as leftovers during the week and having quick and healthy options in the freezer. Eating together as a family, as healthy as possible, is what she encourages.
“If a couple nights are not home-prepared foods, it’s not going to be the worst thing in the world,” she says. “The most important thing is to at least eat as a family in whatever way possible.”
