Proper Diet for Young Kids

Video Transcript

" Hi! This is Patti Billings. I am a certified pediatric nurse practitioner on behalf of expertvillage.com. In this clip, we are going to talk a little bit about food selection and childcare. Children notoriously are picky eaters. What they like this week, they don’t like next week and it’s very difficult sometimes to provide a good healthy varied diet for children. In childcare settings in particular, the food should be easy to prepare, should be relatively fresh and provide a variety of food at least one serving from each food group at each meal. Children may not eat all of the servings of a food group at each meal. They should eat a serving at least in a 24 hour period from each food group. Children generally lack foods they can pick up and eat themselves. Sandwich is going to be cut into small pieces, fruit can be cut into small pieces and if you are creative, you can make designs, you can make a face with cottage cheese and different fruits. Milk is a good drink with most meals. Children cannot be offered milk or juice as an alternative. Other high sugar drinks that have very little nutrients, such as Kool-Aid are not as good of a choice. Children will often eat vegetables, if they have grown with vegetable, so a fun thing for a childcare provider is to have a little garden in the summer and let children plant the seed if it is physically possible even doing it in pots is another possibility and children will often eat what they have planted and grown. They like to help in food preparation. Safety is an issue here and children should not be preparing food unless it is under the supervision of an adult. But children can often help in preparing a meal and putting like vegetable sticks or ranch dressing in a container. Children should not cut or use knives and should not be using the stove or the microwave unattended. Babies should not be put to bed with milk, which has high sugar content. A bottle of milk, which has a high sugar content or other high sugar drinks, like Kool-Aid or even soda pop and because it is very detrimental to their not only to them, nutritionally but to their dental health. We see many babies in our office that have decayed completely gone front teeth because they have a bottle that they have gone to bed with, so you should not let your childcare provider nor at home, should you be putting your child to bed with a bottle. Give them the bottle first and then put them to bed. "