What does your four year old eat?

[AudreyFlaherty]

Our 4yo's diet is causing friction between DH and me, as I want her to eat relatively healthily but I think my DH 'treating' her to junk food all the time is problematic.

Here is a sample of what she might eat -

Breakfast - toast or porridge, glass of milk

Morning snack - fruit

Lunch - fish or meat with vegetables (at school) and fruit/yoghurt

Afternoon snack - glass of cordial, piece of cake or chocolate

Evening - pasta, tomato, cheese / frozen pizza or fish fingers / quiche / bubble and squeak etc, yoghurt and jam/sugar

And at weekends / during holidays, she'll normally have an ice lolly or ice cream nearly every day, crisps in the afternoons, and DH likes to go out for fast food or to a restaurant. I'm in charge of the evening meal but I've had to modify what I cook so that DH and DD will eat it!!

Please can you tell me what your 4yo eats and what you think of the food I'm serving? Thanks

In the evening do you mean you’d give her yogurt with either jam or sugar in it?

It’s not the worst diet ever but could definitely be improved. I don’t think an ice lolly in the summer is bad but cake or chocolate every day seems excessive. Could you swap this for raisins or maybe even an Organix fruit bar or similar? And eating out could you do instead of McDonald’s somewhere like Nando’s (less frequently as more costly) as chicken and chips and sweet corn etc isn’t a bad meal.

FWIW lots of 4 year olds eat very similar and mine has days where they eat loads of crap! Treats are fine but if they have cake every day it’s not a treat it’s just normal and then the worry is they grow up thinking cake is an everyday thing.

My 4 yo ds ate much the same. He liked cheese cubes, baby bel, tiny pork pies, baby plum tomatoes, cucumber, little mushrooms filled with breadcrumbs, cheese & chopped olives, home made cheese straws.

Toddlers can have a high fat diet so I went for savoury snacks rather than sweet. Cake and ice pops were a weekend treat.

Ds’s dad did the same, sweets, sugar and other junk. Salty snacks were our arguing point. Used to drive me mad.

I think it looks fine really. DS is 4 and he eats something like this;

Breakfast - toast with butter and marmite, milk

Snack- fruit, cheese, sometimes crackers, milk

Lunch - Ham sandwich, cheese, cucumber, yogurt, fruit sometimes a pepperami, squash

Snack, crisps or chocolate or ice lolly

Dinner, wholewheat pasta with pesto/tomato or chilli or meat and veg

Milk before bed

It's not perfect but it's not something I worry about

Seems ok to me. Could you try swapping the cake for something more healthy ? Nuts and dried apricots ? My boys really like pistachios and they contain iron as well.

I think it's ok (I also have a 4yo DD btw). I wouldn't give chocolate every day for afternoon snack. Our snacks are always fruit, cheese, breadsticks etc but we do have chocolate or biscuits occasionally (like maybe 2 or 3 times a week)

I would not put sugar in yogurt, I think that's giving her the idea that things need sugar for taste. We have natural yoghurt and add fruit to it sometimes. Occasionally I do buy flavoured pot yogurts but not often because I find they are too small and they always want 2 or 3.

My DD will be 5 in August and one thing I've noticed recently is she is constantly starving. She has never eaten so much. Feels like I feed her every half hour at the moment. Last night she had a massive plate of spaghetti Bolognese, said she was really full, then asked for peanut butter on toast half an hour later!

Seems like a lot of processed foods. Does she eat any vegetables? Eggs?

It's not the worst but my 4 year old eats the same evening meal as us. She'll have the occasional meal of beige freezer food but usually we all eat together at 6:30 and have the same thing. Something like:
Curry or chilli, rice and veg
Meat, mash and veg
Pasta bake and salad

My two are skinny af because they are so active. 18m and nearly-4, both around 50% for height, 30% for weight.

Breakfast 7: Porridge with banana and raisins, or cereal if I'm feeling nice. Milk or squash.

Snack 11.30: slice of toast, peanut butter

Lunch 12.30: pitta, cheese, hummus, tomatoes, fruit, 1-2 fig rolls, packet quavers or hula hoops. Fridays are bake at home vegan sausage rolls.

Snack 2.30: crackers and cream cheese or homemade sugar free "cake", hummus and cucumber

Dinner 6pm: lentil spag bol, lentil shepherds pie, cowboy bean wraps with rice, cheese and sour cream, pizza night on Fridays, pesto pasta, stir fry, egg fried rice. Pudding of strudel and custard, yogurt and strawberries if they've had an active day and not eaten much.

My biggie will happily gorge herself all day if I let her so I try not to make a big deal of food. We are trialing free access to the fruit bowl.

My little alternates a big appetite and small one.

I never encourage them to eat more or to stop eating.

DC are a bit older now but they ate (apart from nursery and school days) what we ate. I usually cook from scratch so they ate all kinds of stuff early on and are totally non-fuzzy eaters (even though one has severe ASD and severe learning diffs, the kind who often survives on a beige diet).

In terms of what you serve, I think it is not a healthy nutrition at all. far too much sweet and sugary crap.

Whiskas - every meal. But then he is a four year old cat.

Do you put jam/sugar in yoghurt? Why?

On an average day mine eats weetabix for breakfast, with a bowl of chopped fruit after (strawberries, grapes, banana etc).
School lunch, or if she’s at home it’ll be soup and a bread roll/scrambled egg on toast/omelette or similar. Yoghurt after.
Afternoon snack... flapjack/crackers/cereal bar or similar.
Normal evening meal... bolognese/curry/meat or fish with potatoes and veg/stir fry etc.
Something like jelly and fruit after.

If it’s hot and we’re in the garden then often an ice lolly. Maybe one ‘junk’ type meal a week (we’ve been getting McDonald’s drive thru on a Friday since they reopened).

It sounds fine to me. And replacing choc /cake with dried fruit really isn't any better in the sugar content!

I give my toddler plain yoghurt for breakfast and sweeten it with fruit and/or honey (if the fruits are sour,e.g. Frozen berries), or fruit puree. You can buy big jars of it in the tinned fruit aisle.

Thanks for your replies. Sounds like I don't need to go nuclear just yet then, but definitely some changes to be made.

The yoghurt thing, DD was happily eating plain yoghurt with home-made (no less!) fruit compote until DH swooped in with the sugar.

DH has the MOST appalling diet I've ever known. He always wants all the chips, the burgers, the cake, the chocolate, the ice cream, the coke... He is obese and I worry about his health, and I increasingly worry about the impact he is having on our family's health. I am not overweight but I do have arthritis which would be easier to deal with if I lost a stone; I know it's my own problem to deal with but I think dieting would be easier if he didn't always bring piles of junk into the house.

And despite the fact that he works from home while I commute 1.5 hours per day, I still have to do all the cooking - he doesn't mind making dinner in the slightest, but he will only ever make junk food so I can't let him do it regularly.

He is an incredibly good father in every other way, but he seems to have such a blind spot here!

Mine at 4 ate

Breakfast- cereal with milk, fruit, sometimes a treat like chocolate milk, pain au chocolat, or chocolate cereal
Snack- Fruit, veg, or crisps
Lunch- hot school meal/ McDonalds happy meal/ sandwich usually egg or tuna mayo
Snack- piece of fruit, one day a week sweets, occasionally an ice lolly
Dinner- Roast/ pasta bake/ chicken nuggets or pizza and chips/ sausage and mash/ stir fry/ BBQ style meat with salad usually Greek with feta, occasionally fish and chips or chicken and chips from takeaway, or packed lunch at after school club
Snack- toast with jam or marmite, sometimes an instant pot of noodles/mug pasta/ porridge especially on sports activity days

Breakfast: usually porridge in winter, toast and fruit in summer, occasionally a pastry/pancakes/omlettes at the weekend

Mid morning snack: doesn't always ask for one, usually an apple.

Lunch: we are all at home atm, sandwich/wrap/scrambled eggs with some veg on the side (usually peppers and cherry tomatoes), fruit salad for pudding.

Afternoon: gets a sweet treat or ice cream, if he is still hungry after he has to eat fruit or veg sticks or some crackers.

Dinner: whatever we're having, more fruit salad for pudding.

(looking back I worry he maybe has too much fruit but the dentist is always happy with his teeth)

It sounds broadly similar to what my 3 and a half year olds eat.

The only thing that seemed odd was the jam/sugar in yoghurt thing... Would never occur to me tbh, but my two don't eat a lot of yoghurt anyway.

For dinners in the evening, my two have whatever the family meal is. Yes, there's the odd beige fish fingers and chips sort of meal, but a traditional meat and two veg, or pasta, or stirfry is more common.

My boy will generally eat whatever is offered, but my girl is after food ALL THE TIME, and is then quite fussy. She will eat fruit etc, but would much rather dive into the snack tin for biccies and treats! We even got her tested for diabetes, as we were concerned about the constant demand for food, but nothing came of it. But we still wonder.

I'd put the flags out if any of my 3 ate as well as that. Sounds like lots of quantity and variety. Not heard of putting sugar in yogurt though.

I'm shocked so many people feed their children processed meat when the World Health Organisation has proven it to be a Group 1 Carcinogen. It literally causes cancer, not 'might' cause cancer, it does!

It's in the same category as asbestos!

Oh don't be silly. Chicken nuggets are hardly in the same category as asbestos. And of course plenty of people feed them to children, they are marketed at children, children like them and parents are knackered!

You are welcome to come and prepare fresh chicken goujons for my children if you are so worried but until then I will continue to buy the Aldi chicken nuggets :o

I broadly trust the EU/UK health authorities to outlaw anything which is proven to be really nasty, anything else, I take with a pinch of salt. And I mean that literally - I'm not one to obsessively check salt levels once they're over about 12 months old either.