What Every Parent Needs to Know about Dietary Needs for Kids Under 5

As parents, knowing where to start with good nutrition and how to instill positive feeding habits for our little ones can feel overwhelming. In this blog, we share with you five key things to think about when feeding children.

As parents, knowing where to start with good nutrition and how to instill positive feeding habits for our little ones can feel overwhelming. In this blog, we share with you five key things to think about when feeding children.

1. Include a variety of foods from the four main food groups.  

1. From around 12 months of age, young children need a variety of foods from the four main food groups…  
2. starchy foods – about 5 portions a day
3. fruit and vegetables – 5 or more portions a day
4. dairy foods – about 3 portions a day
5. protein foods – about 2 portions a day (3 portions for vegetarian or vegan children)

The 5532 guide below shows what this variety might look like and offers some suggested portion sizes for each food group. Children don’t need to eat exactly as the guide suggests every day. It might be more realistic to look at your child’s diet over a week or month and aim for this balance of food groups over a longer period.

2. Establish a good mealtime routine

Young children are growing rapidly and need regular opportunities to eat to meet their energy and nutrient requirements. Creating a structured meal and snack time routine with 3 main meals and 2 or 3 snacks daily for children aged 1-4 years is a helpful way to offer food regularly, meet energy demands and help children learn when to expect food throughout the day.

3. Be a good role mode

Research shows that children whose parents eat more fruit and vegetables typically eat more of these foods themselves, but that children whose parents eat more savoury or processed snack foods consume more of these too.​ If you want your child to eat a particular food, they need to see you eating it.

Try to:​

• Eat together​
• Talk about the foods you enjoy​
• Avoid making negative comments about foods​
• Use other family members and friends as good role models too
• Avoid using food as a punishment or reward for behaviour

4. Expose your child to the foods you want them to eat

Not all children will love food enough to try new ingredients or dishes the first time they’re offered. Eating is a steep learning curve for children and requires their sensory system to process lots of different information that might feel overwhelming at first. For example, before children can even contemplate tasting a food, they need to feel comfortable seeing, smelling and touching that food.  

Repeated exposure, as well as role modelling, is a great way to increase your child’s familiarity with new foods. Children may need to be exposed to new foods around 20 times or more before they feel ready to try it. Remember that exposure doesn't have to be limited to mealtimes only. There are lots of ways you can expose your child to new foods outside of mealtimes too for example…

1. Growing activities
2. Sensory/messy play
3. Cooking/food preparation activities
4. Shopping together – ask your child to place food into the basket or trolley
5. Story time or looking at pictures of food in magazines
6. Singing songs about food

5. Take the pressure off

Children, especially toddlers, crave autonomy and can resist when we try to influence their choices. For this reason, putting pressure on children to eat, or to try new foods may lead to resistance, frustration and stress at mealtimes. It can be helpful to remind yourself that it is not your job to ‘make’ your child eat. Instead, your role is to decide what food you offer and when that food is served. It’s your child’s job to decide how much of the food/s offered they want to eat. When we take this approach with child feeding, as well as the other tips mentioned above, it can help to reduce the stress of mealtimes and allow the child to form more positive lifelong associations with food.