As parents, ensuring our children eat healthily is one of our top priorities. However, how to make healthy food for kids is a tough question nowadays. With busy schedules and picky eaters, it can sometimes feel like an uphill battle. Perhaps, with a little creativity and some easy recipes up your sleeve, you can make nutritious meals and snacks that your kids will love.

In this blog post, we’ll explore the secrets to making healthy food for kids. We’ll also discuss the importance of healthy eating and how to incorporate nutritious snacks into your child’s daily routine.

Why Healthy Eating Is Important?

It is a well-understood fact that a well-balanced diet provides essential nutrients that support growth, development, and overall health. It also helps children to maintain a normal weight and strengthens their immune system. Habits developed in childhood will most certainly stay with them forever, and this is among the top ways to avoid chronic diseases during later life.

How to make Healthy Food for Kids Easily Available?

One of the ways to adopt healthy eating habits is to ensure that nutritious snacks are easily available. Here are some tips for incorporating healthy snacking into your child’s daily routine:

• Have Healthy Groceries Ready: Fresh fruits and vegetables could be washed, chopped if needed, and stored in a fridge to keep it handy. Offer different colors of the fruit basket and make snacking more appealing and fun.
• Offer Snacks Packed with Nutrients: Choose snacks that are rich in nutrients such as fiber, vitamins, and minerals. For example yoghurt mixed with fresh berries, whole grain crackers, hummus, or sliced apples with nut butter.
• Keep Processed Foods and Sugary Snacks to a Minimum: Occasional treats are fine, but try not to make it a habit. Support healthier eating by providing more healthy choices for snacking such as air-popped popcorn, homemade trail mix, or whole grain crackers.
• Presentation Counts: Healthy snacks could be presented in creative ways. You can slice fruits and vegetables into interesting shapes using cookie cutters.
• Involve Your Child in Meal Preparation: Get your child involved in preparing snacks and meals. Let them choose fruits and vegetables at the grocery store and involve them in simple tasks like washing fruits or assembling snacks.

Challenge: Making Children Eat Healthy Snacks

Nowadays, children have become stubborn to even open their mouths! Mothers, doctors and teachers are going round the clock to crack the code of this generation. But, Allah has made our stomachs to churn when hungry so after a point, they will come looking for food. Well, the next challenge is to why have they become fussy eaters?

• Inconvenience: Processed and unhealthy snacks are often more convenient and readily available than healthy alternatives. Parents are mostly running out of time, so they will go with whatever is easily and quickly at hand.
• Influence from Peers: This takes place when children are influenced by peers and advertisements that  persuade them to eat junk over other healthy snacks.
• Taste and Texture Preferences: Children can resist a certain texture or taste that maybe in a certain kind of healthy foods like radish which has a bitter taste.
• Lack of exposure: They might not have been exposed to a variety of healthy snacks or may even have had bitter experiences. As a result, it becomes a permanent dislike towards that food.
• Marketing Tactics: Usually, the packaging of unhealthy snacks is very attractive, with fancy characters and attractive flavors. Hence, it outshines those packaging with healthful snacks.
• Parental Influence: Parents’ personal eating habits and attitudes toward food have a strong influence on their children’s preferences and choices. If parents keep feeding unhealthy snacks or show less enthusiasm towards healthy foods, children may be less inclined to choose nutritious options as well.

Easy Recipe to try at home (Tried and Tested)

Here is a recipe to make easily and quickly at home, to answer the question ‘how to make healthy food for kids’

Veggie Quesadillas

Ingredients:

• Whole wheat tortillas/ rotis
• Shredded cheese
• Assorted vegetables (bell peppers, onions, spinach, tomatoes, whatever is available at home)
• Olive oil
• Salsa (optional)

Instructions:

1. Heat a small amount of olive oil in a pan over medium heat.
2. Add chopped vegetables to the pan and cook for 2-3 minutes.
3. Place a tortilla/roti in the pan and sprinkle with cheese.
4. Add cooked vegetables on top of the cheese and cover with another tortilla.
5. Cook until the bottom tortilla is golden brown, then flip and cook the other side.
6. Cut quesadillas into wedges and serve with salsa if desired.

Conclusion

Indeed, addressing these challenges requires patience, persistence and creativity. However, how to make healthy food for kids is an never ending question. To overcome our challenges as parents, we need to provide a million ways of healthy snacking for our children. With these easy tips for healthy snacking, you can nourish your child’s body and mind while instilling lifelong habits of nutritious eating.