How to Talk to Kids About Nutrition (Part 2)

Welcome to YTF Community, a place to safely share in the challenges and joys of feeding our families. And make all of it easier!

Last month, I shared some of the personal story of how I talk to my own kids about nutrition, and how I answer questions from readers such as “how do you talk to your kids about soda?!”. That post is a great introduction to this topic and it offers a lot of the context for how I talk about food and ingredients, more generally speaking.

Pumpkin oatmeal cookies drizzled with chocolate.

As a follow up, I asked three of my favorite experts on kids to answer more questions to make sure I’m sharing more than just my opinion on this topic. So today we have Dr. Mona Amin, Board Certified Pediatrician and IBCLC from Peds Doc Talk, Megan McNamee, MPH, RD, co-founder of Feeding Littles, Elizabeth Davenport, MPH, RD, LD from Sunnyside Up Nutrition here to chime in.

To start, a reader question:

I try to be neutral and descriptive about food. However my daughter (age 5) has started to ask me if certain foods are “healthy”. They talk about “healthy” and “unhealthy” food at school and on certain days are only allowed “healthy” snacks. Any advice on how to talk about “healthy” with her?

This seems to be a hot topic in schools right now. Another parent told me in a dm yesterday that their kindergarten teacher was doing daily lessons on “healthy” verses “unhealthy” foods and was actually throwing away food from kids lunches she decided were “unhealthy”. Her daughter is now SO anxious about bringing lunch to school. Which, VALID. (All respect to teachers everywhere, but PLEASE for the love of children everywhere and their basic right to eat food at school, do not do this!!)

I sent this question to Dr. Mona because I know she sees a lot of families and I was curious to learn how she responds. This is what she told me.

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