Make Mealtime Educational

Kids are naturally inquisitive. You can play to their need to understand the world around them by encouraging your family to develop a routine of staying at the table after your main course, but before dessert. Use this time to reconnect to your children and answer their questions about things. Make sure that you let them know that no question is stupid. Ask a few questions yourself to get the conversation started.

Another way to make meals and snacks a time for learning is to purchase place mats with erasable puzzles on them. As your children get older, advance them to place mats with maps of the fifty states and challenge them to learn state names as well as the names of the capitals. Then advance to a world map. You can usually find educational place mats at toy stores. You could even laminate a map bought at a bookstore or gas station.

If your kids are playing with their place mats and learning in the process, be excited. Who cares that they are playing at the table? The longer they take to eat, the less likely they will be to overeat, and you might have a proud moment in the future when your kids can point to Bolivia on a map!

More on: Healthy Meals for Families

Excerpted from:

From Raising Healthy Eaters: 100 Tips for Parents by Henry Legere, M.D. Copyright © 2004. Used by arrangement with The Perseus Books Group.

To order this book visit perseusbooksgroup.com.