Parenting By Lolita Bunde
Raising children is a fulltime job that doesn’t come with a manual or warning sign on how hard the job can be. It is up to you as a parent to figure it out while trusting your instincts that you are doing the best you can raising healthy children.
It is always a relief to discover new and better ways of not only boosting your children’s immunity but also keeping them eating healthy.
When it comes to taking healthier foods like fruits and vegetables, children are the worst and will thwart your efforts every time.
Here are five hacks to help you keep your children eating healthy without sweating it:
Make more smoothies
While children might hate solid food, you might actually get it right with smoothies. Children love foods they can munch and drink quickly without you having to fuss all the time.
You can make the smoothies by blending their favourite fruits and adding shreds of vegetables and without them realizing it, they will be eating healthy.
Also instead of buying juice boxes because of how reliable and convenient they are, you can blend your own juice in the house and control their sugar intake.
Children are naturally defiant, they will intentionally refuse to eat whole fruits but will easily relapse when given juice. So blend it.
Add flavour to drinking water
Are you having trouble getting your children to drink water? No problem, simply add lemon, oranges, cucumber or mint to their drinking water to give it some flavour. Children loathe drinking water but anything with taste can pass.
Furthermore, all the ingredient pieces that will be floating in the water will destruct them from actually thinking they are taking water.
Replace juice boxes with sippy cups
When you worry that your children might be taking too much sugar from packed fruit juices than they should, the easiest way is to get them beautiful sippy cups or juice bottles than you can use to dilute the juice without them knowing it.
Children are visual creatures, while they ogle over their cute bottles, you can dilute the juice with water and save them half the sugar intake. Score!
Replace evening snacks with healthier options
Most children take a lot of junk food after school in the evening, this is because they come back home feeling ravenous and obviously at that time you don’t have dinner prepared.
The human brain does not register snacks as food and that is why when children are not carefully monitored they can end up getting obese from eating lots of junk food.
Instead of going for unhealthy snacks, you can give them fruits or sandwiches that are simpler and healthier. For instance, a banana has enough calories to provide the body with enough energy to last all day.
Take advantage of their hunger while preparing dinner
When you are preparing supper, it is always almost like a conditioned reflex action that children will come nagging you in the kitchen. They are able to see you are cooking but still they will complain about being hungry and in need of a snack to munch.
This can be your chance to improve their vegetable intake, instead of giving them snacks you can give them carrots to disguise as vegetables. Carrots are sweet and will destruct them while you cook. It will be a win-win sort for both of you.