Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Developmental Education in Children, Selman Yılmaz,Birce Aslandoğan, Editör, Istanbul University, İstanbul, ss.124-135, 2024
Nutrition education of children is defined as a combination of educational strategies, accompanied by
environmental supports, designed to facilitate voluntary adoption of food choices should begin in the prenatal period
and include all phases of childhood to provide healthy nutrition for the child for a lifetime. The prenatal period and
infancy, toddlerhood and preschool, school age, and adolescence periods are specific time intervals when different
educational strategies should be used. The nutrition of the pregnant mother determines a child’s acceptance and
choice of foods. Nutrition education, should encourage mothers to exclusively breastfeed for six months, with
responsive feeding as a part of the nutritional education of the mother, and to continue breastfeeding for one year and
beyond together with complementary foods, to ensure proper growth for the baby. For toddlers and pre-schoolers,
informal nutrition education is suggested, which includes parents as models at home and foods used in daily
experiences to establish language development, cognition, and self-help behaviours. Nutrition education is important
especially for school children and adolescents because it is not possible to make informed choices without accurate
knowledge. To establish proper eating habits, behaviour-focused nutrition education is appropriate. The components
of this type of education encompass cognitive learning, in which children learn to select healthy foods; emotional
instruction to motivate children and caregivers to change their diet, and behavioural components to create healthy
food choices. Research studies indicate that such interventions establishing behavioural changes result in more
effective changes than a general nutritional education approach.