One of my biggest challenges as a parent is to get C Monster to eat fruits and vegetables. To make it less arbitrary to him when I say "you can not have more bread until you eat vegetables", I decided to make him an interactive food guide. I used the canadian food guide as my example. They have a section where one can create a personal food guide. I used this to determine how much food a 4-year-old boy should be eating.
For the interactive guide I just drew and coloured a chart on a piece of paper and then printed pictures of the food groups off the internet. I cut each one out and attached a magnet to each. Voila: a food guide simple enough a 4-year-old gets it.
The house rules for the food guide are:
- No dessert until all other categories are filled up.
- Once you are done your bread products, that is it for that category.
- Once you have filled up all 4 food group categories, you get a sticker.
1 comment:
He has a tendency to want to heavily emphasize bread products -- particularly sandwiches with wow butter and honey, breakfast cereals and home-made waffles.
That's why if the food chart is complete and he still wants more bread products, he can't have any, whereas if the food chart is complete and he wants more protein, fruit or vegetables, categories that are harder for us to emphasize, he can.
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