Health: Making Healthy Food Fun for Your Home School Child
By Mimi Rothschild
The home school way of life can be tough for both parents and kids. Despite the enormous benefits, there are going to be times when there are fights and arguments. One of the arguments you may have with your home school child is over food. You want to make sure that your home school children are eating healthy, nutritionally sound food, while they may want more sweets or fatty foods than you are willing to let them have. As home school parents, you are in a fantastic position to not only monitor exactly what and when your children are eating, but you can also show them how to prepare fun and interesting healthy food that tastes great, and also incorporate favorite foods in a more healthy manner.
The trick for incorporating favorite, and perhaps unhealthy, foods into your healthy diet is moderation. As home school parents, you have a little more flexibility to make sure that there are healthy meals on the table every night. Stay away from pizza or fried chicken for the family because everyone forgot to thaw something for dinner. However, if you create an environment where there is never any fried chicken, pizza, ice cream, or other tasty treats, you are setting both you and your children up for failure. Make your favorite foods a small part of an overall healthy eating plan for your home school children. Try having dessert night once a week; buying just enough ice cream for everyone to have an appropriate amount, or bake a small cake or small pan of brownies. You can even include your child in the preparation as part of the home school curriculum. Also, you can try eating favorite savory foods, like pizza or fired chicken, at lunch occasionally, when everyone is more likely to eat less. Your kids can get their pizza/fried food fix every week or two and you can rest assured that it is part of a healthy diet.
Another thing you can do to help keep your home school children and the rest of your family healthy is to make some simple substitutions. If you regularly buy milk with a higher fat content, start making your way to skim. If you are currently drinking whole milk, you can go down to 2% for a while, then 1%, and then finally to skim. Instead of butter, you can use lower-fat margarine, and there is even margarine on the market made with olive oil that has no trans fat. Today's low-fat, no trans fat margarines are much better tasting and of a much higher quality than they were just a few years ago. Switch to lower fat cuts of meat, remove skin from chicken, and steam, broil, or boil veggies instead of frying them in oil. In this way, you can make small substitutions that will make a big difference in the health of your home school child and family.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mimi Rothschild is a homeschooling parent, children's rights activist, author, and Founder and C.E.O. of online education company Learning by Grace, Inc. Rothschild and her husband of twenty-eight years reside in suburban Philadelphia with their eight children.
Feeling that “our current system of education has broken its promise,” Rothschild co-founded Learning By Grace, Inc. to provide families with Internet-based multimedia education to PreK-12 children all over the world.
In addition to her twenty years of experience as a homeschool mother, Rothschild has written a number of books dealing with education published by McGraw Hill and others. Her Home Education Websites Blog consists of helpful online content and activities for Christian homeschooling families.
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