Your child is ready to learn to eat most of the foods you eat.
What meal do you have often?
What meal do you have when you want something special?
How can you make those foods right for your child?
What foods can your child pick up, chew, and swallow?
Here’s how to make food right for your child:
- Have food that is moist and tender.
- Cut food into bite-sized pieces to make it easy to pick up, chew, and swallow.
- Offer cooked vegetables. Offer soft fruits: bananas, orange slices, melon, mangos.
- Change or don’t give foods that can make him choke. Cut hot dogs the long way. Take out all fish bones. Mash cooked dried beans. Cook carrots.
- Offer butter, gravy, sauce, or salsa to make food taste good and slide down better.
- Spicy food is okay if it isn’t too spicy.
What about eating out, ordering in, or having foods from other cultures?
- Ask parents from other cultures what they feed their young children. Foods that are new to us are every-day foods for those families.
- Serve him part of a meal. Even if he doesn’t eat stir-fry or quesadilla; he can still enjoy rice or refried beans.
- Cut pizza into bite-sized pieces. Be careful to cool it down. Cut off the hard crust.
- Give strips of hamburger or cheeseburger. Give French fries if they aren’t too hard.
- Cut up fried chicken or chicken nuggets. Take barbeque off the bone and cut it up.
- Cut up burritos. Cut shredded chicken or beef into short pieces across the grain.
