As your toddler grows up, you would start facing a new challenge of sorts; the challenge of making him/her eat healthy snacks while leaving out the sweets and salty fries. Not many children would prefer to eat fresh vegetables and fruits as snacks, and would most usually throw tantrums when forced to do so. Well, here are some useful tips that can help you encourage your child to start eating healthy snacks from a very early age.
Camouflage them
If your kid absolutely abhors the sight of vegetables and fruits, try sneaking them into baked goods like cookies, brownies, muffins and popsicles. Browsing the internet would give you plenty of tasty snack recipes that give you plenty of room to squeeze in some veggies and fruits.
You can also use fruits in smoothies and milkshakes so that your kids would never know the difference. For instance, you can mix some berries with yogurt for a strawberry milkshake, or opt to blend peanut butter smoothie and banana to form a banana-nut shake.
Make them look more appealing
Your child would not want to look twice at a boring salad dressing filled with nothing but leafy greens and stalks. But add some variety to it by adding some chips and dips, and your kid would most probably go for it.
You can also cut out the veggies and fruits in different shapes and sizes to make your children more interested in them. For instance, carving rockets out of carrots or making faces out of grapes, strawberries and cantaloupe would make the snack all the more appealing and appetizing.
Spin Tales
Telling your child that eating a particular veggie or fruit can give him/her great powers cannot be considered a lie, considering the fact that they in fact strengthen the body from within. So you can relate spinach to the cartoon character Popeye, rice cakes as alien space crafts, and cherries as magical beans. Any tale that makes your child eat his/her snack would do!
Allow Play
In sharp contrast to forbidding children to play with food, studies have revealed that children who play with their food tend to eat them up faster when compared to those who don’t. So let your child have fun with his/her snack a little bit. You may have a messy table afterwards, but your child would have eaten the snack.
Opt for Dips
If your child does not like the taste of grains, vegetables and fruits, consider adding dips that would mask the flavors of these ingredients. For instance, you can prepare dips made of peanut butter, beans, salsa, flavored hummus and vanilla yogurt to enhance the taste of the snacks that you prepare. This in turn would make your child more inclined towards eating the healthy snack.