The importance of child nutrition and its lifelong impact on both the child’s mental and physical health cannot be over-emphasized. Poor nutrition in children has led to a myriad of imbalances and conditions including obesity, poor cognitive capacity, poor memory, learning issues such as dyslexia and dyspraxia, amongst many others.
Sometimes, professionals like nutritional advisors, schoolteachers, child counsellors, school chefs, or even sports coaches struggle with helping parents and caregivers establish the strong foundation needed for developing healthy eating habits in their children as there is so much conflicting information out there.
But it is important to get nutrition right at this critical time in a human’s life. Ensuring adequate nutrition for a child of any developmental age will help in establishing good eating habits that will impact their food choices as adults.
Why should you learn how to support parents and caretakers with child nutrition?
Besides good quality sleep, hydration, and physical activity, nutrition plays many important roles in a child’s life. Let’s explore some of these roles below:
Child learning and intelligence
Parents and caregivers can be very concerned about the learning speed of their child, whether the little boy or girl is learning at the level that they should be learning in or acquiring speech at the right speed. These are sources of concern for any parent and if they feel that the child is lacking in some way, they will explore different avenues for correcting this, ranging from education to even nutrition.
We know that nutrition plays a pivotal role in brain development, and also in cognition which involves the speed at which a little boy or girl can process information, and their memory (the ability to retrieve data and to store data in the brain). The child’s cognitive development is very important to the parent and as a professional, you have the unique opportunity here to help parents navigate whatever learning challenges their child may be facing.
Many learning problems we see often in children include the inability to concentrate on their learning task or homework for long periods as they are easily distracted; dyslexia; dyspraxia; dyscalculia; slowness to learning and reading; delays in speech development and much more.
Although there may be a multitude of factors that may influence all of these, nutrition is one of those factors that may have a direct impact on the child’s learning abilities. For example, we know from research that children who regularly consume fried foods and junk foods or fast foods may have a lower IQ or poorer school grades compared to those who consume a healthier diet and eat their fruits and vegetables.
So, there is an established link between child learning, memory, concentration, and IQ connected to nutrition, and that’s why parents may want to go to you as a nutrition professional to seek recommendations to improve their child’s diet. To be equipped to help these parents or caregivers, you will need to learn how to perform child-brain risk assessments, including cognition, reading and writing, hyperactivity, and brain-related nutrient deficiency risks.
That and more is what we will teach you when you join our Advanced Child and Brain Development Nutritional Advisor™ certification. You’ll also gain a solid understanding of the impact of nutrition on a child’s IQ, cognitive capacity, memory, concentration, reading, spelling, writing, academic potential, and learning issues such as dyslexia and dyspraxia.
Mood and behaviour
We all think of childhood as a joyful time. Sadly, that isn’t always the case.
Children aren’t exempt from experiencing depression, anxiety, apathy, mood, and behavioural problems. And when it comes to the psychological health of a child, nutrition plays a key role.
Nutrition and psychological health go hand in hand. Many nutritional imbalances may worsen a child’s mood and behaviour and understanding these can help. Ensuring a child is nourished will not only help improve their mood but also give them the energy and stimulus to deal with life’s inevitable ups and downs.
Child psychotherapists and paediatricians are increasingly beginning to recognise how much better their results can be if they address a child’s brain biochemistry and the critical role that nutrition plays in it.
So, one of the many things our Advanced Child and Brain Development Nutritional Advisor™ certification will teach you is how to help parents personalise the diets of their little boy or girl so that it helps address mood swings and behavioural issues.
We’ll also take you through the latest scientific research on the links between nutrition and a child’s brain, mood, behaviour, depression, aggression, ADHD, autism, and epilepsy, including nutritional considerations.
Physical growth and healthy weight
Many parents will worry about the stunted growth or weight of their children.
“Is my child, growing fast enough?”
“Why is my child, shorter than other little children?”
Understanding the right methodologies will help you to track a child’s growth, body mass, and much more. And knowing how to conduct a full-body composition analysis for boys and girls from the age of 2 to 16 is going to help you with these components of nutritional personalisation.
This is why the professional needs to also be equipped with these growth trackers, and the nutrition knowledge to support healthy growth and development.
Inside our Advanced Child and Brain Development Nutritional Advisor™ certification you’ll discover how to identify the risks of obesity and diabetes, which factors lead to unhealthy fat gain, the role of inherited genes, and apply strategies to achieve a healthier body weight.
You’re also going to learn how to calculate a child’s nutritional requirements and how to adjust these for boys and girls, their age, their metabolism, and their activity levels. We’ll be giving you our exact system to perform all this, so you’ll know exactly what you need to do first, second, third and so on to safely build individualised eating plans for children.
Food acceptance and resolving picky eating
How can you as a professional help parents so that their children can be more accepting of different foods and every family dinner isn’t turned into a war zone?
Picky eating is a common problem parents and caregivers experience with children. We hear of little boys or girls living off fried foods, not wanting much variety in their meals, not accepting new foods being introduced in their diet for that nutritional completeness, and many other issues. Those are the scenarios that many families are going through, but we want a diet that incorporates all of the essential nutrients for our children so that they grow up healthy.
During our certification, you will discover science-based strategies that can help resolve picky eating. Research shows that it takes at least 8 to 15 repeated exposures to a particular food before a child gains acceptance of that food, even when it is initially rejected! Persisting calmly is good… giving up is not.
When you complete your training as an Advanced Child and Brain Development Nutritional Advisor™, you’ll feel confident planning lunchboxes and discussing school eating strategies with parents and teachers. The printable workbooks we will give you contain meal planning tools PLUS a questionnaire for teachers to fill out when you visit their school, so you’ll know exactly which information you need.
You will also learn to use science-based tools to evaluate how parents can influence a child’s food choices, rate the effectiveness of their feeding behaviours, and put forward science-based methods for mitigating picky eating.
How to maximise your professional opportunities in this space
Who would be your clients, and what are some professional opportunities you can explore once you complete our Advanced Child and Brain Development Nutritional Advisor™ Certification?
Families and Parents
As you complete this certification, you’d be building nutritional plans for children, but your client is always the ADULT, and never the child. So you’d be working with the parent or caretaker to help the child. Inspiring good eating habits in children starts at home and continues at school and other environments such as sports clubs. Helping the “grown-ups” to become healthy eating role models themselves.
You can also help with designing personalised menus and shopping lists for the family.
Delivering your WORKSHOPS at schools, sports clubs, gyms, health centres
If you love working with groups, you could run your own family workshops or taste training activities for little children. By using the client templates inside the child nutrition certification, you can hit the ground running with sensory training games, food art contests, meal preparation, and safe cooking together with little children during these fun workshops.
You could also teach children to help with grocery shopping, meal plans for parents to take home with them.
Food/Drink Formulation
The nutritional requirements for the little ones’ growth and development are quite unique. By being equipped with this evidence-based knowledge, you could help with the formulation of child-brain supporting foods, drinks, and ethical supplements.
Meal Delivery Services
As you discover the process of meal planning for boys and girls, you could tap into childmenu design, including child friendly meal delivery services for families, caretakers, childminders, and nurseries, and even offer fresh produce memberships with recipes and educational materials you get during this certification.
Sports Clubs and Gyms
As you learn how to support little children with exercise and nutrition programs, you could help create healthier eateries with child-friendly menus that support physical activity recovery and rehydration.
School Canteens and Cafés
Our certification will equip you with the expertise needed for providing schools, nurseries, and child-friendly cafés with nutritious menus without the usual “kids” foods (fries, chicken nuggets, fish fingers) that can be so detrimental to the growing brain and cognition, opting for meals and foods that support child health and learning capacity
NGOs and Government Organisations
If you’re passionate about helping to improve population-wide policies, such as hydration at schools, access to potable water, or even tackling child obesity, you could help with mobilisation activities and child nutrition campaigns.
Other large-scale ideas include the production of healthier eating reports, sensory training programs at schools, hydration and free-water availability policies, implementation of child-obesity risk reduction tasks, developing child nutrition surveys, and even research.
Paediatric Doctors, Speech Therapists, Family Clinics
After completing our certification, you can collaborate with medical professionals involved in the physical, emotional, and mental wellbeing of children.
Your Next Steps….
If you ever wondered how to build a personalised nutrition plan for a child, how to adjust it for little boys or girls of different ages and metabolism, how to assess the unique nutrient needs of children, how to implement everything, and how to monitor progress, our Advanced Child and Brain Development Nutritional Advisor™ certification will walk you through every step.
We have also made it easy for you to complete this certification by giving you access to a 7-day free trial.
This means you can start learning immediately without paying!
Start your 7-day free trial here.
Also, do you want a chance to learn more about child nutrition and how this knowledge can expand your nutrition practice? Join our live webinar this Friday with UCL researcher and Chief science educator at The Health Sciences Academy, Alex Ruani at 4:00 PM (UK time).
