my approach to teaching my 3 year old to have a healthy relationship with food
trigger warnings: disordered eating, food moralizing, health moralizing
preface: i experienced a lot of food restriction, food moralism and food insecurity as a child, and i believe that these factors led to my development of an eating disorder (orthorexia), which i am still recovering from. i am saying all of these things as a parent who wants to innoculate my child against the food moralism that i suffered.
what i do:
i don't ever force her to eat anything. i will try to persuade her to try something, or to eat more of a thing she knows she likes, but if she still won't eat the thing, i don't push it. parenting involves a lot of choosing your battles, and it's more important to me that she feels respected by me than that she has another bite of a carrot at that particular moment.
we don't tell her "eat your veggies first" because we don't want to present eating vegetables as a chore. she likes a lot of vegetables already, and there's no need to set them apart from other food. we give her a multivitamin to make sure she gets enough vitamins and minerals
we've never treated candy or chips or any food as a special reward that she has to earn. if she can have it whenever she wants, then it doesn't take on any kind of enticing sense of "this is forbidden." and if she wants to eat an amount of candy that might make her sick, we tell her "i don't think it's a good idea to have any more right now because you might get a tummy ache." and she trusts our judgment.
we will sometimes make small snack trays that have crackers, cheese, raw vegetables and sliced deli meat, and she'll munch on them. we teach her that she needs to consume carbohydrates, protein and fat to take care of her body, and if she's been eating exclusively carbs, we remind her that she should eat something with protein and fat, like cheese or peanut butter.
if she doesn't like a food, we don't make her eat it. we might ask "do you want to try it again" but we respect her "no." if she doesn't like the dinner we made, we'll let her eat cereal or a sandwich (or something else quick to prepare). because we don't want her to associate dinner time with conflict. she's much more willing to try new foods if we don't pressure her or make it a big deal.
we don't describe any foods as good or bad for her, because we don't ever want her to feel guilty for eating. we teach her about the comparative nutritional value of foods without judgment. since we're not disallowing her from eating any particular foods, she won't have a drive to eat tons of forbidden ""bad"" food when she's older and we're not present.