Breakfast Can Improve How Well Your Kids Eat Dinner

One of the downsides of the nutrition mindset is that it encourages parents to examine the immediate meal.

Actually, sometimes the nutrition mindset focuses parents' attention on the immediate mouthful! But the habits approach encourages you to step back and look at patterns.

Breakfast can change HOW your kids eat.

Here's a favorite post that explains...

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Yes, breakfast is important nutritionally, but it is also the biggest missed opportunity for teaching your kids to eat right.

You’ve heard the nutrition news a zillion times before: kids need to eat breakfast.  It makes them healthier and better students at school.  (Though I’m not sure kids need the chocolate chip pancakes at IHOP which come in at over 600 calories, or the flapjacks at your local diner which are probably just as fantastic.)

But you probably haven't thought about breakfast from the habits perspective.

Used correctly, breakfast can teach kids to eat new foods.   Used incorrectly... well, you probably know what happens.

Here are three ways to get the most out of breakfast:

1) Use breakfast to get kids used to the idea that they eat different foods on different days and they’ll be more open to new foods.

Most parents settle on the same 1 or 2 things to feed kids in the morning.  It’s a busy time, and we want our kids to eat breakfast (after all, we know how important this meal is).

But feeding kids the same stuff all the time gets them used to eating the same stuff all the time.  No wonder they balk when different stuff comes around - even if different comes later in the day.

Read Make "New” Work For You.

Tip 1: Rotate the breakfast foods you serve.  You don’t need to introduce foods your kids have never eaten.  Simply establish the procedure of not serving the same food two days in a row.  If you must serve cereal every day, at least switch up the brands and the flavors.

2) Use breakfast to expand the taste, texture, appearance, aroma and temperature of foods your kids will eat and they’ll be more open to new foods.

Most parents think they are providing a variety of foods, but they’re not. Breakfast foods tend to all have basically the same taste, texture, aroma, appearance and temperature. 

Toast, cereal, bagels, muffins, French toast, pancakes … they’re all relatively bland, bready products.  Some offer a little more sweet, or a little more crunch, but the variation is minimal.  That’s because the main ingredient is the same: refined flour.

Read The Ingredients Game.

Tip 2: Pay attention to which tastes your kids gravitate towards and then slowly introduce them to other flavors.  Do the same thing with texture (do they only like crunchy?), appearances (are they white or beige eaters?), aromas and temperatures.

Read The Variety Masquerade.

3) Use breakfast to reduce your kids’ dependence on sweet and fat-laden foods and they’ll be more open to new foods.

A lot of what we feed our kids in the morning fosters eating habits that run counter to the healthy stuff we’re always begging them to eat.

Do our kids really need to develop a lifelong taste preference for butter, cream cheese, and sugar?  Not if you want them to eat broccoli.

Tip 3: Teach your children that …

• Butter is an ingredient in food, not a topping on food.  Yes, it’s yummy but it’s also 100% fat, and nothing else. Get your kids in the habit of eating toast topped with peanut butter, cottage cheese, hummus, guacomole... anything but butter. 

• Cream cheese is a treat, not a staple. According to the USDA cream cheese doesn’t fulfill your kid’s daily dairy requirement because it doesn’t have enough calcium.  Instead, it’s a fat delivery system - thinkcream cheese - that packs in 100 calories per ounce. Most people slather on at least 2 ounces. Read about USDA Milk Group.

• “Children’s cereals” – which have up to 85% more sugar than those marketed to adults -- are treat snacks, not breakfast foods.  Maybe this is one reason most kids have such a sweet tooth! Read A Spoonful of Sugar? 

• Syrup.  Is there really any point?  Think Coke without the bubbles.  Ounce for ounce Aunt Jemima’s syrup has 5 times as much sugar as Coke.  (Coke has 3.3g sugar per ounce; the syrup has 16g per ounce. A point of reference: those little packets of syrup served at fast food joints are approximately 2 ounces.) Teach your kids to enjoy pancakes with jelly, fresh fruit or -- here's a radical idea -- plain naked (then they'll know what pancakes really taste like).

When it comes to teaching kids to eat new foods every meal counts, especially breakfast.

~Changing the conversation from nutrition to habits. ~

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Source: Zinczenko, D. and M. Goulding, 2008. Eat This Not That for Kids. New York, NY: Rodale. p. 74; product labels.

What Preschool Teachers Want YOU to Know

Stop sending in so much food.

A few weeks ago I conducted a workshop at a daycare/preschool center in NJ where parents pack their children's food. What did the teachers there have to say? 

1. Parents send in too much food.
2. Parents send in too much snack food like pretzels and crackers.
3. Parents wonder why their children aren't eating their vegetables. 
4. Parents think teachers should monitor what the children eat better.

Imagine, a small child sitting down to lunch. He pulls out 5, 6, even 7 containers. Most contain preferred foods like crackers, pretzels and cookies. One has a sandwich. One contains carrots.

How, these teachers wonder, are they supposed to make sure this child eats at least a few bites of the sandwich and some of the carrots? Because when the parent comes to pick her child up, that's what she's going to want to know: 

• Did he eat the sandwich and carrots? Or, more likely...
• How come my son ate his crackers but not his sandwich?

Don't think this is a phenomenon limited to this one daycare/preschool center. Everytime I talk to preschool teachers I hear the same complaints.

And so teachers resort to the bribing, bartering and cajoling that parents use: You have to eat at least a bite of your sandwich before you can have your cookies.

(Don't know why that's a failed strategy? Read Wheelin' & Dealin': 10 Reasons Why You Shouldn't Trade Peas for Pie.)

Here's something to consider: Providing too much food actually encourages children to be picky. They never have to consider eating anything they don't want at any given moment. 

In my experience, many parents are guilty of sending their preschoolers off in the morning with too much food. In fact, the pickier the child the more likely parents are to overpack. It's a strategy that backfires.

• Here's the logic: "I never know what Sally will eat so I pack a lot of choices to make sure she has something she wants."  But...
• When parents pack lots of snacks (crackers, sweetened yogurts, juices) there is no reason for your toddler to eat the healthy stuff.

Packing too much food sets your child up to fail.

It sets up a bad dynamic for the preschool teachers. And, it also teaches your child to fear hunger. Read The Upside of Hunger.

Children need time and incentive to considering eating right. Read: Let Your Kids Sit with Their Own Struggles.

Send your child to daycare or preschool with a reasonable amount of food.

And your child will be more likely to eat (at least some of) everything you send--the healthy stuff included.

You'll also be making your child's teacher's life a little easier.

~Changing the conversation from nutrition to habits.~

Preschool and Pop Tarts

You've grown a great eater...until he lands in daycare or preschool.

That's what happened to Michelle's son. He was a shopping cart-riding/broccoli-gnawing tot until he got to preschool where he was exposed to Goldfish crackers, gummy candy, and some sort of birthday treat from a classmate nearly every week.

And to Courtney's son. He was an eating champ until he got to daycare where they served him cafeteria food like macaroni and cheese, corn dogs, and even Pop Tarts for snacks.

What can you do?

You can become an advocate for change. You can also use this as an opportunity to teach your child how to live in a world dominated by this stuff.

There isn’t anything your children need to understand about eating right that can’t be presented in child-sized nuggets.

No child is too young to learn how to handle sweets and treats. But you can't teach this stuff just by limiting the junk. You've got to talk to your kids too.

Talk to your child about proportion.

Proportion is easy to explain: We eat some foods more often than other foods.

And, there's room in the diet for everything. Including Pop Tarts—which I still eat once a year or so when I'm in the mood to taste my childhood!

Here's a sample dialogue.

• Mary: The food you eat at daycare is pretty tasty, isn’t it?
• Bob: Yeah, I love it.
• Mary: I love that kind of food too. But you know what? It’s not the healthiest food.
• Bob: It’s not?
• Mary: No. Remember how I always say that we have to eat things like fruits and vegetables more often than we eat hot dogs, noodles, and cookies?
• Bob: Yeah.
• Mary: Well, because you eat all that Fun and Treat Food during the day, we have to be extra careful to eat Growing Food at home. That’s why I am always going to offer you things like apples and pears for snack when you get home from school. You don’t have to eat the snack, but there won’t be food again until dinner. Okay?
• Bob: Okay, but I don’t like pears. They’re mushy.
• Mary: I didn’t know you don’t like pears. Thanks for telling me. This must be a new thing because you liked pears last week. Let’s make up a list of the fruit you like right now and I’ll make sure to include those items in our Rotation Rule. Okay?
• Bob: Okay.
• Mary: But remember, I’m going to keep serving pears from time-to-time. I like them and you never know when you might want to start eating them again.

Don't know about Growing Food, Fun Food and Treat Food? Read Slackers Rule. Or what the Rotation Rule is? Read End Picky Eating with The Rotation Rule.

Some lessons can’t be learned by structure alone. They need explanation.

Imagine walking into your child’s classroom to find the teacher handing each child a book. Afterwards, you watch the teacher sit down in her chair, open her book, and start reading quietly to herself. 

It wouldn’t take long before the children figured out what they were supposed to do: open their books and start reading. 

So far the teacher’s actions seem reasonable. They also seem perfectly adequate: the children have all the information they need to figure out what they’re supposed to do.

Now imagine that the children don’t know how to read. Do you still think the teacher’s actions seem adequate? Probably not. Some lessons need active instruction.

If you’re worried that having this kind of conversation with a young child would make him feel bad about his daycare center...

As if you’re somehow putting them down or accusing them of serving unhealthy food, you could add something like:

• “Every family eats differently and your teachers have to make sure they serve something that everyone likes.” Or, 
• “Your teachers know that kids like to eat Fun and Treat Foods with their friends. But we can’t eat these foods all the time.”

The key to authoritative parenting is blending a solid structure and firm discipline with warmth and compassion.

That’s why talking to your children is so crucial. It’s where the warmth and compassion come in.

During these conversations you not only get to explain your thinking to your children, but your kids get to explain their thinking to you.

For more on this topic, read When School Nutrition Stinks.

~Changing the conversation from nutrition to habits.~