In teaching your child to become a healthy eater, you are also teaching him or her to become a healthy functioning individual. There are important steps you can take to help your child to develop a healthy relationship with food that will last their whole lives.

1. Understand and help your child to understand that food is fuel for the body, not a fattening enemy to be feared.

2. Find out how your child thinks and feels about food, weight and eating. Bring this up as a topic for discussion. You are your child’s role model, mentor, and ideal; more importantly, you are the best teacher he or she will ever have.

3. Explain that he or she has every reason to be confused about what healthy eating is. The media is full of conflicting reports about what is currently in vogue to eat, which diets are best, etc. Many people, including your child’s peers, are preoccupied with shape, size and body image concerns, thinking about it, talking about it, restricting food, worrying about what they eat and even judging others based on their size.

4. As you discuss these issues with your child, recognize that you are raising his or her self-awareness as well as her consciousness of the world around her. You are letting her know how important she is to you, as you teach her to become a critical and discerning consumer of the media. These are life lessons that will improve her self-esteem. They will benefit her throughout her life.

5. Make breakfast every day. Don’t ask your child if he or she is hungry enough for breakfast; ask instead what she feels like eating, listing the several choices available. Your child needs to understand that everyone must eat breakfast in the morning in order to break the overnight fast and prepare one’s brain to function maximally throughout the day. Breakfast is simply not negotiable.

6. Sit down to the table with your child and eat breakfast together. It is a wonderful way to connect with your child, to prepare her to deal with whatever tasks await her that day, and to nourish her both physically and emotionally. This ritual will do a great deal for you, too.

7. Prepare her brown-bag lunch so that she has available to her the kinds of nutritious foods that she enjoys most at midday. Make certain that all or most of the food groups are available to her in each meal, especially protein for alertness. Replace chips and other unhealthy snack foods with nutritious treats such as raisins or other fruits (dried and fresh,) nuts, popcorn, celery sticks with peanut butter, cheese and crackers, yogurt drinks, etc.

8. Fill your refrigerator with fresh and nutritious snacks for after school, including milk or soy products, cottage cheese, yogurt, humus, vegetables, lunch meats, tuna salad, and hard cheeses. Display a full bowl of fresh fruit brimming with beautiful, sumptuous and inviting fruits of many kinds throughout every season. Keep it in a highly visible and accessible place. Don’t buy fat-free or lite foods.

Remember that healthy eating represents a lifestyle, which involves balanced, nutritious meals to be eaten at least 3 times a day. Healthy eating is sociable eating which includes a varied diet where all the food groups are represented. Even “junk” or non-nutritious foods are perfectly fine when eaten in moderation and not in the place of nutritious foods. What is worse for the child than eating non-nutritious foods is forbidding them, as extreme deprivation results in extreme cravings.

Parents need to keep in mind that fat-free eating is not healthy eating. Children need fat in their daily diets to grow their neurological systems throughout the childhood and adolescent years. Young women need fat in their diets and on their bodies in order to sustain the hormone estrogen that enables them to reproduce, carrying on the species. When eaten in moderation, there are no bad foods