Preparing Healthy Yet Simple Meals With Your Children

Eating healthy and planning well balanced meals for your family can be daunting ~ for me anyway! We have two boys and one is especially picky with his food. This month, we explore the benefits of engaging your children in helping to prepare healthy yet simple meals.
While poor nutrition and childhood obesity are critical issues threatening our children’s short and long-term health, proper nutrition helps prevent childhood obesity, promotes physical growth and enhances focus. As parents, it is our responsibility  to promote good nutrition for our family and lead by example. What better way is there to show our kids healthy eating tips than to have them assist us in the kitchen?!

A suggestion is to look online and in cookbooks for meals that your family will like and that are properly balanced with the correct amount of nutrients.  Pick recipes that you think your kids would enjoy helping you to make and that are not too difficult in time or number of ingredients.  Think: protein, vegetables and fruit with not too many carbohydrates.  Maybe you prepare chicken and flatten/season it while the kids steam vegetables and cut fruit.  Or the kids prepare pasta and heat sauce while you grill vegetables/slice fruit.

Pinterest has excellent ideas on placing fruit into fun animal shapes.  I think kids are more likely to eat kiwi and banana with strawberries if they make the shape of a monkey than if the fruit is in a bowl. That can be better said than done in my house though!

Engaging your kids in the kitchen promotes family time, introduces them to different foods and hopefully incites them to make positive food choices at mealtime.

AMO is a contributing writer for North Fulton Family Life.  This article may be found in their January 2017 publication. ;))