Did you eat all your colors? Balanced meal planning.

Yuck, broccoli. Turnips again? And, you’ve got to be kidding… Three Bean Salad?!?!?! Now, a few decades later, I can enjoy broccoli, a holiday meal isn’t complete without turnips (rutabagas, actually) but I’m still not fond of Three Bean Salad.

best payday loans

Now it’s my turn to put food in front of the boy.

We read somewhere that a child needs to be exposed to a food X number of times before he might try it. Well, we’re exponentially beyond X. So here’s our strategy, and it’s been working, though not always smoothly, and not without some negotiating and explanation. We have a Canada Food Guide on the fridge and created a chart with coloured boxes to correspond to the recommended daily servings of each food group. (Green – fruits and veg, Yellow – grains, Blue – dairy, Red – meat and alternatives) As he eats through the day, we add a magnet to each square. When he wants a snack, we check to see which food groups need a boost, and we select something from that “row”. If he has completed all his rows, he can have something “not healthy”.

Once in a while we get him to create balanced meal plan that we all eat. We allowed him to substitute items too, but that has presented challenges that we wanted to avoid, namely creating two meals: one for us, and one for him. We still struggle with that – if it’s a balanced meal that covers the food groups, I’m ok with that, but I also want him to try a variety of foods and learn to appreciate foods he may not love, but can tolerate occasionally. I’d love to hear strategies from others about managing meal time .

Other Dads Online

This entry was posted on Friday, March 26th, 2010 at 3:18 pm and is filed under Personal Development, Social Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

About Daddy

I love being a father. When my son was born, I thought, “Here’s my chance to try out all those things I learned about in university about child development!” I have an Arts degree in Psychology and Religion, and an Education degree in Secondary English as well as some work in a Graduate degree in Education Technology. I spent the last 20 years working in schools as a classroom teacher, an administrator, and a technology consultant. Throughout, I learned about socialization, concept formation, behaviour management, creating activity to stimulate the intellect and imagination, and lots of other effective tricks of the education trade. If it works at school, probably works at home too. This is not to say that I am a perfect parent, nor is my child a perfect child. My measure of success is simply that we are thriving in our work, home, and study environments. Take what you want, discard what you don’t, share your experiences, and let’s talk about parenting. @milesmac

Visitors

M	T	W	T	F	S	S
« Nov
		1	2	3	4	5
6	7	8	9	10	11	12
13	14	15	16	17	18	19
20	21	22	23	24	25	26
27	28	29	30	31