It s Not About The Broccoli Three Habits - 3134 Words

One of the toughest things parents have to face every day is getting their children to eat right at the dinner table. Breakfast, lunchtime, and dinnertime to some families can be stressful times of the day because the parents and the children just cannot seem to agree on what the children should eat, why they should eat it, how much they should eat, and when they should eat. Many parents know what their children should eat, but just do not know how to get their children to actually eat them. In the book, It s Not About the Broccoli: Three Habits to Teach Your Kids for a Lifetime of Healthy Eating, Dina Rose insists that the only way to get children to eat what you want them to eat is to move away from the nutrition mindset—that is solely†¦show more content†¦About The Author Dina Rose, PhD, is an experienced, researcher, teacher, and public speaker who has helped many parents think more about shaping their children’s behaviors using her teaching method than thinking about nutrition. She is a sociologist, parent educator, feeding expert, active blogger on her own website, and writer for the Huffington Post and Psychology Today. Dina’s mother had passed away from an illness related to obesity when Dina was five months pregnant with her daughter. The premature death of her mother and the birth of her daughter pushed her to develop her passion to teach healthy eating habits to her own daughter and to other children. How Focusing on Nutrition Leads to Poor Habits Dina Rose first explains what is wrong with the nutrition mindset and how it leads parents to fall into traps that ultimately lead to inadvertently teaching children bad eating habits, instead of good ones. I can honestly admit to falling into these traps myself (and can admit for my mother that she falls into these traps as well). The first trap that leads to bad eating habits is parents being selectively attentive to the ingredients in certain foods that that are good while totally discounting the bad qualities of that food. For example, some parents zero in on the calcium their children get from eating mac ‘n’ cheese and overlook the extremely high amount of sodium in it. Another nutrition trap parents do not realize they fall into is