Nurture Your Growing Child

It is well known that children need a balanced diet for proper growth and development. However, as parents it gets difficult for you from time to time to understand the appetite of your little one. Planning a healthy diet plan for a growing child is not so easy but there are certain points that you need to keep in your mind:

1. Firstly; plan meals as per their nutritional value. Add all the important nutrients to make your child’s food healthy and tasty.

2. Secondly; repeat the food among the healthy category that your child likes the most, by doing this you can minimize meal time conflicts with your baby.

3. Thirdly; Plan from beforehand for the entire week so that you can avoid confusion during preparing your baby’s meal. Also staying planned is an advantage if you have a kid to take care of.

It gets even difficult to make a child familiar with healthy food when he or she starts going to school. School is a place where your kid interacts with several others, leading to developing a sense of liking towards specific foods and dislike towards some food category. In such scenario the best possible solution is to cook healthy meals in a very tasty form maintaining an eye catching look of the food at the same time. So, you cannot ignore garnishing.

A healthy diet plan for growing a child must include almost the same nutrients as their adult counterparts but in varied quantity. Depending on your baby’s daily routine, you can plan his or her meal.

1. Young children are usually energetic and get themselves involved in a lot of activities. So, a specific portion of carbohydrate and fat is essential to meet your child’s rapid growth, to keep him or her healthy.

2. Meat, fish, poultry, milk, etc make up for the protein content of the diet. Protein helps in brain development and proper growth and function of body tissues.

3. An extensive variety of vitamins and minerals are required for growing children. Calcium being an important nutrient is available in milk and dairy products and also in dark green leafy vegetables. It helps in building bones and maintaining bone density.

4. Again, meat, fish and poultry can be rich sources of iron that is required to expand blood volume.

5. Vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin B complex is essential for immunity and growth.

6. Make sure that your kid’s diet is low in saturated fat in order to avoid any chronic diseases in adulthood.

Have regular family meals where the entire family eats together. This will give your child an opportunity to learn from your eating habits. So if the family follows a healthy diet, then your kid is likely to follow the suit. Also get your child involved in grocery shopping and cooking so that they develop an interest towards food. Research and innovate healthy snacking options for your baby instead of empty calorie snacks. So, cultivate a healthy eating habit in your growing child to initiate his or her maximum growth.