"A lot of people choose to feed their baby, finish bath time, and then sit down with their partner to eat dinner. But eating with your baby as a family has a lot of benefits."
The day your baby starts eating solid foods is the day you’ll start to see the benefits of eating as a family. While it’s easy to get tunnel-vision when it comes to your adorable baby, the best thing you can do is to treat them like a member of the family.
Here are some of the benefits of eating family meals with your baby.
1. A study found children who ate with their families were more likely to eat fruits and vegetables. Making your baby’s food before yours often leads parents to use pre-packaged foods or snack foods that are less healthy than what they eat themselves.
2. Eating with your baby, and eating the same thing as your baby, is a perfect chance to introduce foods with different flavors, textures, and spices. A recent study showed that people’s saliva changes as they repeatedly eat bitter foods, making them taste less bitter. The fastest way to get your baby to like fresh kale is to feed it to them frequently. This is also the easiest way to make sure they are getting regular servings of all the allergens you eat.
3. The conversations between adults at your family meals ensure your baby is hearing more words and beginning to see how people interact with each other. Children who watch their parents engaging with each other are quicker to learn proper social interaction with their peers, and hearing more words expands their vocabulary faster.
4. Watching you eat with proper table manners and using a fork and knife helps children learn, even before they have the skills, to mimic the movements and learn to eat. They learn by imitating you. New foods look less intimidating when you eat them. Cups and silverware seem a little less confusing when they watch you use them.
