As a parent, you worry that you're not providing adequate nutrition to your child, especially if he is active or growing rapidly. However, guidelines that direct a diet for growing kids can easily be implemented. Covering basic nutritional needs and paying careful attention to your child's growth ensures that you are helping your child grow into a healthy adolescent.
Time Frame
While a basically healthy diet consists of a proper balance of vitamins, proteins, carbohydrates, minerals and fats, children's dietary needs change as they grow. Tracking caloric input and nutritional needs is critical to ensuring that kids grow properly. The Mayo Clinic's website reports that caloric needs for boys differ from that of girls. Boys generally need more calories per day than girls to ensure they are growing properly.
Significance
A few nutrients are key to help maintain healthy growth. Calcium, for both growing boys and girls, is critical to long-term health. Since a child's skeleton is basically set by early adolescence, the more calcium a child ingests, the better. Yet Kidshealth.org notes that over two-thirds of boys and girls don't get enough calcium. Since calcium is a main nutrient in many dairy foods--especially milk, make sure your kids are drinking milk and eating dairy products in abundance to help their growth. KidsHealth states that as of 2010, the dietary guidelines for calcium are 500 mg daily for kids 1 to 3 years, 800 mg daily for kids 4 to 8 years and 1,300 mg daily for kids 9 to 18 years of age.
Considerations
One of the best ways to ensure that your child has a healthy diet is to sit down with him at the family table. Family meals provide not only a chance to eat together and partake of a healthy, balanced meal most of the time, they also provide an opportunity to talk to one another. Children who eat family meals are more likely to have a healthy, balanced diet. In addition, they are less likely to snack on unhealthy options. And, most importantly, as children enter the tween and teen years, those who eat family meals are less likely to abuse drugs.
Effects
What you eat impacts your kids. Younger children especially model the behavior of their parents. If you want to ensure that your children are eating a diet that is appropriate, make sure you're not snacking on processed foods or drinking soda.
Identification
If you're concerned about your child's growth, check with your pediatrician. Children are typically charted at each annual visit to ensure that they are growing according to their estimated growth pattern based on their percentile at each visit. The University of Michigan Health System states the actual percentile is not important. What's important is that your child is consistently and steadily growing at the percentile she should be, based on her growth pattern.
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