How to Get Your Fussy Toddler to Eat a Healthy Diet

As parents we are bombarded with information on how important it is to provide our children with healthy food.   Doing the best we can we provide a meal that’s packed with nutrition for our toddlers only to find that (almost overnight) they refuse to eat it!   Toddlers turning into fussy eaters can be really hard to deal with.   As parents we feel guilt really easily and want to do our best, but all the great toddler food recipes in the world can’t appease a picky eater!

There are ways in which you can get your picky eater to eat a healthy diet.   Every child is different, but one thing they all love is playing games.   Combining games with bribery can help ‘encourage’ them to eat a healthy balanced diet.

Now if you don’t have time for games you could try the ‘serving their food up again’ approach.   In our household this wasn’t very successful as my daughter was as stubborn as I was as a child!   One evening she would not touch her dinner so I served it up for breakfast – no deal, lunch – it wasn’t being eaten.   Dinner the following night and my daughter was still refusing to eat.   Having a child refuse to eat all day filled me with so much guilt and hubby was quite adamant that we couldn’t continue with that ‘experiment.   Score one point for our fussy eater!!

What did work to turn our fussy eater around was a combination of games with a touch of bribery thrown in later.   I call the games the color game and the how many game.   If you’re having toddler eating problems then hopefully you’ll also have some luck with these ideas.

This game involved using a chart and was a competition between my fussy toddler and myself….this worked really well because my dd loved to play games and try and beat me!   Our chart was basically a word document that we’d printed off with three columns – one with our daughter’s name and one with mine and one that listed the days down the side.    We would mark in our column every time we ate a different colored food and whoever ate the most colors each day was the ‘winner’.

Red foods = tomato, red capsicum

Green foods = lettuce, cucumber, beans, broccoli

Orange foods = oranges, carrots

You get the idea.   Our picky eater was always very excited at breakfast time because she would eat weetbix with milk, followed by peaches which meant 3 different colors.   What did mum have for breakfast?   Porridge with milk which was only ONE color!

As with any game there came a time when this ‘game’ became boring and that’s when we moved on to the ‘how many’ game.

Hubby and I decided that this game should come with rewards as opposed to being a competition.   Again, deciding on this was simply down to what we felt would work on our child.   Bearing in mind that every child is different you need to decide on your own reward system for either of these games.

The reason behind this game was that our daughter’s nutrition had improved and she was eating vegetables and a little fruit, but her diet was pretty stagnant as she didn’t like to try new foods.   Finding new toddler food recipes to try that would give her maximum nutrition was no good if she wasn’t willing to try ‘strange’ things!

Another chart was set up, but this time we were counting how many different foods we could eat in a day.   As an example if I ate a handful of peanuts that would be one food, but if I ate a handful of mixed nuts it would count as however different types of nuts were eaten.

My daughter has always loved peas (I don’t know where she inherited her taste buds from as I’m personally not at all fond of peas!), but with this game we could encourage her to have peas and corn for a 2 count or mixed veg for a 5 count.   On a salad day instead of her just eating grated carrot she would eat a small (very small!) amount of lettuce and some raw capsicum as well.

I forget how many different types of foods we wanted her to eat every day, but if she did meet our target then she would get a treat.   This treat varied each week and we would tell her what treat we were working for at the beginning of the week.   The treats varied from a family picnic to a toy or an ice-cream at the beach.   To be perfectly honest they were usually things that we had already planned to do, but don’t tell her that!

One week I remember we had to cancel plans because she just wouldn’t eat much food, but most weeks it worked out really well.

If you’re having problems getting your children to eat healthy foods then hopefully one of these solutions will help, but if not there are other ways –