A healthy lifestyle is important for everyone, regardless of age. However, it is particularly important for children. It is not only what genes we carry that matters. The diet of the mother before pregnancy, during pregnancy and during lactation affects the health of the youngster.
At different stages of a child's life, different nutritional errors can be noticed.
A child's unhealthy diet is most often caused by poor parental nutrition. It is difficult to imagine children eating vegetables, fruit and whole grains at the same table with parents eating fast food, for example.
This is why we nutritionists often say that parents/guardians play the most important role in child nutrition. It is the parents' nutrition that determines how children are fed.
Parents care about the health of their children. They prepare meals that are tasty and attractive, but they do not always follow the recommendations? What is the reason for this? Probably due to a lack of education. There are more and more new brands, new products in the shops. In addition, there is an ever-increasing range of 'baby' products, which very often are not adapted to little tummies.
What are the causes of feeding errors?
The rush of everyday life
The most common mistakes are due to the rush of everyday life, lack of time for regular meals eaten as a family. Meal irregularity or skipping meals is often a consequence of imitating the lifestyle of adults. Due to lack of time, we also often buy various ready-made products without checking their composition. It is worth spending a little more time when shopping or ordering a ready-made meal to take home to read its composition. Mums, you don't have to cook every day, if you don't have the time or the possibility, you can use ready-made meals - but this doesn't exempt you from reading the ingredients.
Lack of movement
Lack of exercise, a sedentary lifestyle is another effect resulting from adult imitation. Parents spend time in front of laptops, mobile phones or the television. They often "buy" time by giving their child a cartoon to watch or a tablet to play. And I don't mean to negate such behaviour, as there are different situations in life. It is also important to find time for physical activity. Let's give children an example to follow.
Skipping a meal
Sometimes we are so focused on getting our children to eat healthy that we don't listen to our kids. We persuade children to eat, we worry when they refuse a meal. And it is we parents who forget the basic principle of child nutrition: It is the parent who decides what to give the child to eat, and the child who chooses what and how much to eat.
Each of us sometimes skips a meal because we are not hungry, or we do not always feel like eating a particular soup or sandwich. It is also natural to have a bigger appetite one day and a smaller one the next. Children are smart and can listen to their own bodies too.
What we teach our children from an early age will have an impact on their health as adults.
Good health, proper education and upbringing are the foundations for the proper development of society. If, from the first years of childhood, we take care to ensure a proper diet rich in a variety of vegetables, fruit and whole grains, and make sure children drink enough fluids, we will probably minimise the risk of diet-related diseases in adulthood.
The formation of the baby's eating habits starts at the pregnancy stage. The way the mother eats is important not only for the health of the mother, but also for the baby.
Poor eating habits established in childhood only exacerbate health problems in adulthood. Adequate nutrition is fundamental.
At Kids Medic, you can benefit from dietetic services by signing up with our nutritionist Katarzyna Ring-Andrzejczuk.
Katarzyna Ring-Andrzejczuk
