Parents can help children learn to love good food and enjoy physical activity. The toddler years are a good time to establish healthy habits for life.


Visit our Make a Book section to build a customised ‘book’ with this and other essentials on toddlers.
Go to Make a BookChildren watch what you’re eating. You can help toddlers learn good eating habits by eating well yourself. If you load up with hot chips and soft drink, that’s what they will want too.
Some children reject a new food 6-10 times before they taste it and love it. Eat a food enthusiastically yourself. If it is still rejected, try it with your child again in a few weeks or a few months. Children’s tastes can and will change.
Encourage your child to be physically active – you’re helping to establish a healthy lifelong habit.
Exercise gives your toddler strong bones and muscles, a healthy heart, lungs and arteries, and improved coordination, balance, posture and flexibility. It reduces the risk of your child becoming overweight or obese and of developing heart disease, cancer or diabetes down the track. Being overweight is unhealthy and uncomfortable – and very unpleasant for a young child.
TV is one of the biggest obstacles to physical activity. Many child development experts recommend no TV at all for children under two. If you do want to let your child watch TV, try to keep TV time to 30 minutes. Then follow it up with an outdoor activity (like a walk to the park).
This short video features parents talking about junk food and children. Mums and dads share strategies for making a healthy diet part of everyday life. As part of this, they suggest approaching junk food as a ‘sometimes’ food. But the best strategy for getting your kids to avoid junk food is keeping it out of your home. If it’s not there, your children can’t eat it.
By Raising Children Network
You can help your child adopt healthy eating habits and enjoy being physically active.
This article is an extract only. For more information, visit raisingchildren.net.au/nutrition__fitness/toddlers_nutrition.html.
Sourced from the Raising Children Network's comprehensive and quality-assured Australian parenting website www.raisingchildren.net.au.