For Holly Howard, her experience as a Norland Nanny has led to a passion for enabling parents and carers of fussy eaters to help their children to enjoy mealtimes.
The result is Nanny Cooks, offering bespoke solutions to those mealtimes challenges for families across the region.
“Since graduating from Norland College in 2019, I have been able to travel the world doing what I love, having worked for families in Spain, France, Italy and America,” explained Holly. “This includes families with children from newborns up to 12 years old.
“Throughout my career, I have supported many eating journeys and have been faced with a fair few fussy eaters along the way. This has seen me build a bank of tried and tested tips, tricks and recipes to help deal with the challenges that can occur at mealtimes and develop tools that actually work.
“By complementing this experience with an online Child Nutrition and Cooking course authorised by Stanford University, I was able to set up Nanny Cooks, a paediatric food consulting business, to help parents through the challenges of fussy eating.
“With every child being unique, fussy eating and a child’s eating habits can portray themselves in many ways. However, the most common challenges include:
- Throwing food or tipping the plate upside down.
- Lack of willingness to try new foods.
- Refusing to eat or sit at the table.
- Screaming, shouting or crying at dinner time.
“I provide a tailored approach for each child through observing them at mealtimes… because let’s be honest, one size does not fit all! This approach helps them to thrive and create the stepping stones for a life-long positive relationship with food and healthy eating habits.”
Here’s Holly’s top three tips to instil life long positive eating habits in children and encourage them to be curious eaters.
Empower – We want to empower children to be involved in the preparation process, helping them to take ownership and increase the likelihood of them eating the food. For example, getting children involved in the meal planning process, going to the shops to help them select the ingredients, assisting with preparing the meals or laying the table.
By involving children in this process, you are increasing the chances of them eating the food. This involvement also helps to teach children vital life lessons and have a greater understanding of the food they are eating.
Choice – By giving children a choice, you are helping to give them control over what they are eating. This helps to promote healthy choices, including letting the children serve themselves while also provide them with some non-negotiables, which helps to ensure they still have a balanced meal. Children can also be part of the meal planning process – allowing them to choose recipes for the week, which also helps to increase their control over what they are eating.
Playing it safe – Whilst it is important to expose children to new tastes and dishes, it can be overwhelming for a child and put them off the whole meal. We want to encourage children to be creative eaters and this is where playing it safe comes in. Encourage children to try new foods whilst including a ‘safe’ food. For example, this can include serving an adventurous lentil curry with more familiar pitta bread fingers to dip in.
For more information head over to Holly’s website: www.nannycooks.co.uk or send an email to email hidden; JavaScript is required