Education and nutrition Do children always have to try every meal?

Try instead of study: more fun at family meals
Soup Kasper and Zappelphilipp - the idiosyncratic eating behavior of our offspring was already a well-known phenomenon in the 19th century. Experts will discuss how family meals can succeed in the Stuttgart Slow Food Fair. While crooked and restless children have always made eating family meals difficult, worried and over-anxious parents are nowadays added: do my children eat too much or too little; Does it tolerate this or that food at all? That's what the modern mothers are asking, seeking advice in a flood of education counselors.

In contrast, the experts recommend parents to ponder less and try out more. "We should make our children feel like new groceries: gardening, shopping and cooking together," advises Sigrid Fellmeth, BeKi expert for child nutrition in Mannheim (BeKi = Conscious Child Nutrition, Landesinitiative Baden-Württemberg). The children should feel, smell and taste a lot. Eating is a sensual experience and not a matter of the mind. "Children just need time and rest to develop healthy eating habits, and they often have phases with certain preferences, such as spaghetti with tomato sauce, which then disappear again," explains Fellmeth. Therefore, the most important recipe for insecure parents is to stay calm. Tensions and uncertainties are transmitted to the children and hit everyone on the stomach.

Taste with fun at the meal. Coercion is superfluous and counterproductive. (Image: pressmaster / fotolia.com)

Even more important, however, is that all family members regularly come to a table. At lunch, at least primary school children can unload their ballast from school. Ever since both parents work in more and more families, less is eaten together and if at all, then more often in the evening. "But still half of all working parents gather at the dining table once a day," says Professor Lotte Rose of the Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences. The older the children are, the harder it gets.

The young people have more and more appointments and want to be autonomous. To exercise compulsion, however, would be out of place. "Eating is sometimes hard on the self-evident self-determination of our children, but it can be an important place to learn democracy, meaning children should be able to share their ideas about food, and parents should justify their positions and negotiate compromises." , recommends nutritionist Rose. Otherwise, the atmosphere must be right. Otherwise the best food will not taste. Jutta Schneider-Rapp, bzfe