Mindful Eating For Kids

The first taste of your favorite foods is often the best. Imagine: the first sweet lick of an ice cream, the lip-puckering zing of a tart grapefruit, or the spicy, redolent morsel of hot biryani. You may close your eyes for a moment to take in the flavors and textures, and quickly ready yourself for the next yummy bite.

As children, we lived through this magical period of discovering the landscape of flavors, smells, and aromas for the first time, discovering and falling in love with food. Toddlers eat by splattering food all over the table, feeling textures, and exploring different tastes. And while you may not fling food on the floor anymore, being careful—or eating mindfully—is a lifelong journey, but it's worth it. Mindful eating is the practice of paying attention to your food, noticing the taste, texture, any aromas—in short, becoming acutely aware of the experience of eating. Including mindfulness in eating and food habits can help build a healthy relationship with food, says Roundglass meditation expert Lisa Kring: “The patterns we learn when we are young run our lives."

Teaching mindful eating to kids is a great way to introduce them to the practice of mindfulness, which will help them live more peaceful, content, and confident lives. “Meditation and mindfulness practices can improve and build on children’s existing strengths,” says Christopher Willard, clinical psychologist and author of “Child's Mind: Mindfulness Practices to Help Our Children Be More Focused, Calm, and Relaxed.”

Mindful Eating Fosters Healthy Eating Habits

A 2019 mindful eating study conducted on children and mothers in Aomori City, Japan, found that mothers who practiced mindful eating regularly had healthier eating habits, which positively influenced those of their kids. In fact, mindful eating had a stronger impact on eating behaviors than health education, suggesting that it may be more important to appreciate your food than to understand the facts behind nutrition.  

Make Mindful Eating Fun

The events of the day can bring a lot of pent-up emotions and stress to the dining table, but a mindful eating exercise can be an excellent way to bring a family together. “Kids learn by observing," says Kring. "You can help children regulate their own stress by calming down yourself." If you slow down, your kids will, too. 

You can teach your kids to eat mindfully simply by practicing it with them. Ask them about what they are tasting. Start a conversation about the types of food on their plates and how they got there — talking about the origins or the farming of a type of vegetable or fruit can help bring interest and awareness to what children are eating. Call out smells and sensations to get your kids excited about paying attention to their meals. 

“Being mindful together and asking a child about the food they are eating, simple questions —‘What do you taste? Do you taste cinnamon?— will make them naturally curious," says Kring. "They will be truly experiencing their food. It can be a shared embodied experience. Kids are great at this if it feels like a game. Maybe they will find a food smells different from the taste of the first bite. Eating mindfully can be thrilling for them.”

Practice Gratitude

Mindful eating can help children become aware and more appreciative of their food. Teaching kids where food comes from will help them learn to respect the effort that goes into making a meal, says Kring, who teaches mindful gardening in schools. "It's about getting into your senses and kids do that naturally. Children love understanding where food comes from. They enjoy understanding that it is a collective event, and a process that represents nature: The sun, the earth, and the natural world that brings us food. The effort of so many hands can help children feel interconnected. They feel grateful.”