Meal Ideas for a Four Year Old

Hands-on Mealtime

• Kids love to play with their food. Let them have some good, old-fashioned fun and make it likely food ends up in their tummy. Provide your kids with finger foods and dips as a sure-fire way to get them interested in dinner. Give them healthy snacks to munch on, such as carrot and celery sticks with low-fat ranch dressing, pretzels with yogurt or pita chips with hummus.

  Give your kids some safe kitchen tools and let the fun begin. A four-year-old can spread cheese on crackers or use a plastic cookie cutter to make shapes with his sandwich. Fill squeeze bottles with homemade syrups and draw silly faces on pancakes or French toast.

Choices

• Allow your child to make choices between healthy alternatives for mealtime and eliminate food battles. Choices can be extremely simple variations on the same food; for example, ask a child if he wants to have his eggs scrambled or over-easy. Offering choices to a four-year-old, whose burgeoning independence grows as fast as she does, makes it more likely she will expand her culinary palate on her own.

  A food bar can be an exciting way to offer culinary choices and variety to kids. A food bar allows parents to introduce new foods, and it gives your child the opportunity to create a fun, healthy meal to eat. Tacos, pizza and omelets are popular choices for food bars, but parents can create one to accommodate individual taste preference.

Have Kids Help in the Kitchen

• Four-year-olds are the best sous-chefs, because they are enthusiastic about food, naturally curious and love to learn. Grocery shopping can accomplish two tasks in one. Take your child shopping and allow her to pick a meal for the week. Point out different fruits, vegetables, meats and cheeses, asking him to discern textures, sizes and shapes. Let her try a sample from the deli or other counter to expand her taste buds. Allow your child to assist in packing and putting away the food once you get home.

  Assign simple and safe tasks during meal preparation, such as measuring and pouring liquids in the bowl (with parental guidance), tearing lettuce for salads or washing fruits and vegetables. The more involved your four-year-old becomes in the entire cooking process, the more likely she will eat the dinner she helped pick out, put away and prepare.

Be Sneaky

• For kids who reject fruits and vegetables, sneaking them in does work. Most kids cannot taste the "offending" food and eat with gusto before realizing. Puree the fruit or vegetable to a fine consistency. Mix in a small amount with sauces, soups, muffins, breads or other dishes. Sweet potato, squash and spinach are easily hidden in pasta sauce; zucchini, mango or pumpkin mixes well with soup. Gradually increase the consistency of the fruit or vegetable until your child will eat it alone.