If there’s one area that you will need to be careful with when it comes to your child, it’s definitely food. If you don’t give your child the right foods, you will affect everything from their growth to supposedly even their academic progress. With that much riding on your child’s diet, it can be hard to even approach the subject without feeling nervous.

As hard as it sounds, the first thing that you must do is relax. You aren’t sending your child to an early death just because you feed them hot dogs on special treat nights. Still, most parents are going to be pretty concerned with how their children eat, and there’s nothing wrong with that at all. It’s just a matter of making sure that you have the right blend of foods for your child and make them readily available.

Will your child have different nutritional needs at different stages of their life? Sure they will. When they’re infants, they’ll need mother’s milk or formula in order to get from one day to the next. However, when they grow up, they’re going to need more nutritionally solid foods. You will need to watch their progress and just make sure that they’re not only getting what they need for growth, but also getting it in portions that are fit for their young bellies.

The biggest issue in food safety is portion size. You want to ensure that all of the pieces you put on your child’s plate aren’t going to be too big, or awkwardly shaped. This will help them get their food down. If you can help it, you generally want to eat at the table with your child, even when you might be feeling a little time strapped. If they were to begin to choke, you want to be able to move in right away and take care of things. Child safety feels like a full time job, but you always have to be on your guard.

As your children grow, you shouldn’t feel like you can’t talk to them about food, either. If you make food feel like something that they can’t talk about, they won’t come to you about questions they have. This can become a deep problem, and it’s a problem that you would really be better off avoiding as much as you can. If you really want to make sure that you aren’t going to have to worry as much, you might want to let your children have more say over what they eat — to a point. Giving them the option of selecting from a menu of healthy options is a good thing. This gives them the feeling that they are making the decision and not you, which lowers the chance of your children rebelling against your attempts to help them eat better.

One thing that makes your children feel better about the choices they make when it comes to healthy eating is if you make it a family effort. You shouldn’t always focus on items that are hailed as kid-friendly without looking at the labels. After all, the things that are marketed as being fit for families are usually some of the most high fat and high calorie products on the market. It might take you longer to figure out what to buy in the store, but you really should be taking the time to look at the labels as much as you can. There’s no reason to skip over this when your family’s health is on the line.

So, in summary, you will need to keep a constant watch over what your children eat, as well as how frequently they eat. It can be hard at first to get your children and the rest of your family to start eating better, but they will love the results over time!