Want to Teach Kids About Nutrition? Start With Child Development.

We teach reading developmentally: ABCs, letter sounds, words.

We teach math developmentally: numbers, value, addition.

But when it comes to food, we too often skip development entirely.

When we teach kids about nutrition, we often begin with abstract ideas like health, balance, nutrients, and disease prevention. But what does “healthy” mean to a five-year-old? What does “balance” look like? What is a nutrient?

We might explain that tomatoes are good for their heart or that carrots are good for their eyes. And while the information may be accurate and our words may sound simple, what we teach and what a child understands are not always the same thing.

This is where child development matters.

What Hide-and-Seek Can Teach Us About Food Learning

Think about a preschooler playing hide-and-seek. They cover their eyes and believe you can't see them because they can't see you. It's funny and sweet, and it also shows us something important: kids use the thinking skills they have right now to make sense of the world.

We recognize this easily during play. But when we're worried because our child has eaten the same five foods for weeks, it gets harder. We want to help, so we reach for the tools we know. We explain nutrition, talk about health, and tell them why they should eat their spinach.

The problem isn't that we care too much or that nutrition doesn't matter. It's that we can forget how much nuance is packed into our adult understanding of nutrition. Kids are making sense of the same information with a very different set of experiences and thinking skills.

What We Say Is Not Always What Kids Understand

Kids aren't miniature adults who need bite-size adult nutrition lessons in simpler words. They're constantly using what they already know and what they can see, touch, smell, hear, compare, and experience to figure out what something means.

Take the word “healthy,” for example.

When an adult says, “This food is healthy,” we might mean:

• This food contains nutrients that support your body.

• This is one of many foods that can be part of an overall pattern of eating.

• This food may help you feel satisfied even though I can’t eat it because I have a food allergy.

• No single food determines your health.

That's a lot of invisible context packed into one little word.

A young child may hear something much more basic:

• This food is good.

• I should eat this food.

• The other food must be bad.

• Eating the “right” food makes me good.

That doesn't mean mentioning health will automatically confuse or harm a child. It means we need to stay curious about the meaning kids might make from our words.

If carrots are “good for your eyes,” might a child who doesn't like carrots wonder if that's why they need glasses?

If purple and blue foods “give you a strong brain,” might a child who doesn't have them often wonder if that's why learning feels hard for them?

If a child hears “sugar is bad,” might they begin to wonder if enjoying something sweet is bad too?

Recent research gives us reason to ask these questions. Quigley and colleagues (2025) found that kids and teens often described foods in simple “good” and “bad” categories. The researchers noted that this may reflect how kids interpret messages about “healthy” and “unhealthy” foods and emphasized that food messages need to take age and cognitive development into account.

In other words, we may intend these messages to be simple and encouraging, but kids make meaning from them with the understanding they have right now.

Food Messages Can Become Body and Identity Messages

And kids aren't only learning what our words mean about food. They're also learning what those messages say about their bodies, their families, their peers, and even themselves.

A child who repeatedly hears, “You're such a picky eater,” may begin to believe that's simply who they are, rather than something they're experiencing with certain foods or textures.

A child living in a bigger body may hear an adult criticize their own size and begin to wonder what that means about theirs.

A child who hears a food from their family or culture called “bad,” “unhealthy,” or “weird” may begin to wonder what that says about their family, culture, or where they belong.

A child who is praised for finishing certain foods may begin connecting eating with approval or being “good.”

One comment doesn't determine a child's relationship with food, their body, or themselves. But these relationships take shape through many ordinary experiences over time.

And many of those experiences don't look like teaching at all.

The Invisible Curriculum™: What Kids Learn Between the Lessons 

Kids begin learning about food long before they can define a nutrient or understand the concept of “health.” They learn from what they see, what they hear, and what they experience every day.

I call this the Invisible Curriculum™, or the 3 Ms:

• Modeling: What kids see adults do

• Messaging: What kids hear and how we communicate

• Moments: What kids experience through our everyday responses and interactions

Imagine a child hears an adult say, “I was bad today. I ate a cookie.” The adult may be expressing frustration about their own eating habits. But the child doesn't have access to all the thoughts, experiences, and cultural messages behind that sentence. They may simply hear: Eating a cookie can make someone bad.

Then Grandma makes her famous chocolate chip cookies. Now something that could have been delicious, familiar, and connected to Grandma carries another possible meaning too.

What adults model, the words we use, and how we respond in everyday food moments (even the things we don’t say) all become part of what kids have available to make meaning from.

This isn't about blaming adults either. Many of us are still unlearning food and body messages we heard growing up, and we can't control the meaning kids make. But we can become more aware of what we're giving them to make meaning from.

What Does Developmentally Appropriate Food Education Look Like?

It isn't about teaching kids less. It's about teaching better. It's about starting with what kids are ready to understand at each stage of development.

A young child may not understand how specific nutrients work, but they can investigate:

• What they notice about how a food looks, smells, feels, sounds, or tastes

• How two foods are alike and different

• Which parts of plants we eat, like broccoli flowers or carrot roots

• How ingredients become a familiar family dish

• What changes when food is heated, frozen, mixed, or mashed

• How hunger, satisfaction, thirst, energy, or comfort feel in their body

• How different families grow, prepare, share, and celebrate food

These aren't stepping-stones to “real” nutrition education. They're the foundation of how kids learn about food.

Kids are building language, sensory awareness, practical skills, scientific thinking, cultural knowledge, and connection with their bodies. They're building concrete experiences that can support more complex learning later. Even squishing a blueberry between their fingers to see what happens is learning.

What Could This Look Like With Broccoli?

Imagine we want to teach kids about broccoli.

We could say:

“Broccoli is healthy. It has vitamins that help your body fight off sickness.”

That's nutrition information, but much of its meaning is invisible to a young child.

Now, let's consider what could happen if we hand them a piece of broccoli and get curious together…

Did you know the top of broccoli is made of tiny flower buds? What do you notice about the floret compared with the stem? Does it remind you of anything? Do they feel the same? What do you think is inside the stem? What changes when we cook it? How does your family prepare broccoli? Do you like it better raw or roasted?

It may not look like a traditional nutrition lesson, but look at how much learning is happening.

Kids are observing, comparing, building language, making predictions, noticing sensory information, learning about plants, and connecting food to family life. There is room for both information and exploration. The question is whether the information matches what kids are ready to understand.

Five Questions to Help Us Teach Kids About Nutrition Differently

Before creating a lesson, activity, handout, social media post, or even deciding what to say around the dinner table, ask:

1.      What do I actually want the child to understand?

"Learn that tomatoes are good for your heart" isn't a clear learning goal. What do we hope the child will know, notice, understand, or be able to do?

2.      Is this idea concrete or abstract?

Can the child see, feel, investigate, or experience it? Or are we asking them to understand something invisible, complicated, or far in the future?

3.      What might the child conclude that I didn't say?

If one food is described as "good," "clean," "healthy," or "better," what might that communicate about other foods, the people who eat them, or the child themselves?

4.      Does the experience give the child room to think?

Are we inviting kids to notice, compare, predict, ask questions, and make connections? Or are we asking them to repeat an answer we already gave them?

5.      Am I only measuring learning by what gets eaten?

A child can learn about a food without tasting it. Smelling, touching, preparing, growing, sorting, describing, and asking questions are all ways of gathering information. When eating is the only outcome that counts, we can miss the learning already happening.

Ask a Different Question

Nutrition education often begins with an adult goal: How do we get kids to eat better?

But what changes when we ask:

How do we help kids learn about food in ways their developing brains can understand?

We start noticing more than what they ate. We notice what they're learning, what they're feeling, what they might be communicating, and what meaning they might be making.

We make room for curiosity, sensory experiences, culture, autonomy, practical skills, relationships, and individual differences. Nutrition still matters, but so does whether a child can meaningfully understand what we're trying to teach.

This developmental lens is part of the foundation of my book, Food Positivity: How to Ditch Diet Culture and Talk to Kids About Food. It asks us to look beyond what we want kids to eat and consider what their experiences may be teaching them about food, bodies, peers, and themselves.

Because we aren't only teaching kids about food.

“The way kids experience food shapes their sense of self and how they learn to nourish themselves for life.”

~ Dani Lebovitz, MS, RDN

Dani Lebovitz, MS, RDN, is a pediatric dietitian, children’s author, food education expert, and founder of Kid Food Explorers. She is reimagining how kids learn about food by bringing together pediatric nutrition, child development, and education.

Read more in her bio linked from the author page.

Reference:

Quigley F, Lynch L, Price R, Hollywood L, Gallagher AM, Mooney E, McCloat A, Moorhead SA. 'I want food to be tasty and healthy': school-children's experiences with nutrition education and messaging. Health Promot Int. 2025 Sep 3;40(5):daaf151. doi: 10.1093/heapro/daaf151. PMID: 41031640; PMCID: PMC12485605.

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