Do you struggle with helping your children eat a healthy diet?  I think everyone does from time to time.  For us, we usually think things are going ok until something happens to remind us that we can do better.  This happened in our family a couple of weeks ago when my son became quite ill for several days.  Other members of our family had a few minor symptoms for a day or two, but my son became much more ill and it took his body much longer to finally heal.  I’m sure there were many factors at play, but we took a close look at his diet and realized there was a lot of room for improvement.  He’s recently become really picky about what he eats, which hasn’t helped.  We’ve tried to implement a few things to help our family get back on track to eating more healthfully.

• Our kids, like most kids, love to snack.  They would much prefer to snack all day than eat meals.  This is especially hard in the summers, when their days are pretty open and free.  We usually are ok with a mid-morning snack and one in the afternoon.  We now tell the kids that their morning snack has to be a fruit or a vegetable.  It isn’t their very favorite thing, but they’ve pretty well stopped begging for fruit snacks at 8:15 am after not eating their breakfast.  We do have to remember to stock our fridge with snackable fruits and vegetables.  We’ve been doing applesauce, baby carrots, cucumbers, olives, pickles, apricots, or frozen berries.
• We are trying to incorporate more vegetables into our meals.  This sometimes means hiding them.  One of the most successful things we’ve found is to grate yellow crookneck squash into our ground beef for tacos.  It looks like cheese.  And, we just might tell our children it is cheese.  Sometimes we mix spaghetti noodles half and half with spaghetti squash.
• We’ve been spending our evenings preserving our garden produce for our family to eat in the coming months.  We are making fruit leather out of apricots from my parents, and loaf after loaf of zucchini bread.  America’s Test Kitchen has a zucchini bread recipe that calls for part whole wheat flour, and uses much more zucchini than any other recipe we’ve tried.

These are just a few simple things we are trying.  Maybe one or two of them will work for your family too.