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Getting your child to eat healthy is no easy task. It requires lots of time, effort, thought, patience and perseverance. Here are a few tips to help your child eat healthier foods and dishes:

Make nourishing your child a priority

This is essential in order for you to encourage your child effectively to eat a nutritious diet.

Stock your home and fridge with foods you would like your kids to fill up on

The key to success is to encouraging your child to eat a nutritious diet. Your child will eat what's available, and usually if there are a wide variety of unhealthier options freely available, these will take preference over the healthier alternatives.

Fill your trolley with nutritious, healthy items.

Believe in what you are trying to implement

If you don't believe that your child will eat a specific dish in the first place, you are unlikely to convince him or her to do so.

Set a good example

Your child will mimic your eating behaviour, so changing your child's eating habits means changing your own.

Find out why your child won't eat

He/she could be too tired to eat or perhaps has drunk juice or milk too close to the meal and is not hungry enough. Even dehydration could suppress a kid's appetite for food. In many instances children also use food as a power tool and learn to manipulate parents to get their own way.

Persevere

It is common for a child to refuse a new or unfamiliar food the first time you offer it. Did you know that it has been shown that kids need 10 to 15 exposures to a food before accepting it? So try and try again, in a different form, with a different food, in a different environment, on a different day.

Offer only one food at a time with small portions of a favourite dish and insist your child eats at least one mouthful of the new food.

Tempt them with healthy, nourishing foods

Strategically place cute containers or serving dishes filled with healthy, nutritious items, and they will grab and eat them on the run.

Be creative and different

Who says that supper should include cooked vegetables? Serve fruit with a meal, or raw veggies to decorate the plate. Thread raw veggies on a wooden skewer and serve with supper instead of cooked vegetables. Serving raw peas in an egg cup is bound to get your child asking for more. Make the word 'vegetables' synonymous with 'vitamins'.

Teach them

Teach kids about what type of food their bodies need. Make them understand the link between food and health.

This information is from the book 'Sustained energy for kids'