Healthy Kiddie Meal Choices

About author / Pamela Chester

Mom of two; graduate French Culinary Institute; kids cooking program instructor; Master's degree in food studies. Creates kid friendly foods and loves her slow cooker.

It’s a parenting conundrum that many of us are faced with on a daily basis when feeding our children. Do you go with something quick and easy that you’re sure they will eat or do you try to offer a food that might be unfamiliar to their taste buds at the risk of them rejecting yet another meal?

My son is what I call “strangely picky”. He eats enough healthy foods like chicken soup, brown rice, fruits, and (some) veggies that I don’t worry too much about his nutrition. But he also loves toddler staples like goldfish crackers and chicken nuggets. In fact, if given a choice, I bet he would happily eat baby yogurt and crackers for all of his meals.

I thought I was doing all the right things by introducing him to a very healthy diet of a mix of veggies, lean meats, dairy and healthy carbohydrates, with the occasional treat thrown in. But now he is at the point where if he is not familiar with a food, he will instantly reject it. He’ll just flat out refuse no matter how delicious I make that food out to be. After months of me trying to convince him that pizza was a delicious food that was worthy of his attention he finally started to eat it on a limited basis. But he still doesn’t eat toddler staples like macaroni and cheese or hamburgers.

Which leads me to my current healthy eating challenge. What do you do when you are on vacation or travelling for a number of days? It seems that offering our children a variety of healthy eating choices is a particular challenge when on the road or travelling. If I know we will be away for a number of hours or more, I make sure to pack up foods in the cooler bag to take with me that I know my little one will eat. But it’s not so easy when travelling for longer time periods. While currently in Puerto Rico on vacation, we have been lucky to find a kid’s menu in almost every restaurant we’ve been (it’s a very child friendly kind of place).

But I have been noticing more and more that kid’s menus everywhere are very similar. They usually offer the same four or five staple choices--sure bets like chicken fingers, hot dogs, and macaroni and cheese. And what’s so wrong with these foods anyway? They’re familiar and they taste good (heck, I am known to grab a bite of chicken finger or a French fry from my son’s plate).

Well I don’t think anything is wrong with these choices, per se. But I wish there was also the possibility of ordering a child sized portion from the regular menu along with more variation and one or two other healthier choices that would make it as staples on kid’s menus. Until then I will probably still prefer to have my son eat from my plate or bring my own if I can. As a start, the recipe for turkey meatballs below is one of the sure bet foods I know my son will eat and it’s a healthy choice with a side of pasta and veggies. I sauté a few batches (without adding tomato sauce) and freeze them separately so they are easy to pop out and warm in the microwave.

I firmly believe that only offering kids a choice of the same few foods leads to a vicious circle--giving them choices that they are guaranteed to eat at the expense of their long term health. Throughout this week I have been wondering, will my carrot stick eating, whole wheat bread loving son come home and demand the French fries and chicken nuggets that he is now so used to eating while on vacation? I’ll let you know next week!

Serves/Makes: 4

• 1 pound ground turkey
• 2 tablespoons breadcrumbs
• 1/4 cup milk
• 1 large egg white
• 1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese
• 3/4 teaspoon dried oregano
• coarse salt and ground black pepper
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 1 can (28 ounce size) whole tomatoes in puree