Third option:
- Keep the veggies in Mom and Daddy’s plates and not make any remarks when kid takes them. Or if she doesn’t.
This is one of the few things I may have done right while raising my kids…
Cut the celery/onion/bell pepper in largish chunks. Tell the kid “If you don’t want to eat it,just push it aside… The chickens will eat it” The vitamins/minerals were in the food and it gave them a sense of power… and we got plenty of eggs.
You also could tell her"Well,this food is for grownups. You can’t have any" Then walk to the fridge
My kids aren’t big on vegetables either, but we get them their share. A big thing is repeated exposure (as stated by others upthread). The more you give them a certain food, the more they’ll be accustomed to it (and perhaps even give up on the notion that they can get away with never eating it).
One green vegetable that my boys really like is chinese broccoli from dim sum. (I suppose it doesn’t help that it’s got a sheen of butter :P) Edamame seems to be popular as well.
I agree that this, or some variant that works in your household, has a lot of potential. We did something similar, though a bit more elaborate, when our son was small. He had a giraffe napkin ring and a small stuffed moose that lived on the dining room table. We would act things out with them - the two animals had very distinct personalities. The moose was a paragon of maturity and common sense, whereas the giraffe was impulsive and thoughtless.
Despite the fact that the moose was always telling the giraffe to behave, the giraffe constantly tried to steal food from our son’s plate, depriving him of the opportunity to taste it. In order to outwit the giraffe, our son would then quickly eat the food in question - thwarting the giraffe and causing the somewhat smug moose to tell the giraffe to stop being so greedy.
This sort of thing might not work for your child, but I’ve always said that "“Ninety percent of parenting small children is marketing.” So figure out how best to market stuff to YOUR child.
Also good luck and remember it’s probably just a phase anyway, unless she’s still not eating veggies a year from now.
“Here comes the aeroplane” didn’t work for long with my son. Not gruesome enough. He liked “Little Red Riding Hood Skips To Her Doom”.
(banana splits theme song) La la la, la lala la la, la la la aaargh! Aaaahhh! Aaaaah!
Before that, it was Louie The Fly. Piece of food flies around in the end of the fork, buzzing. There’s a brief frantic buzz when it lands in the mouth and gets chomped on.
Now I just try to trust that he won’t stave himself. I make sure he has healthy options for every meal and try to leave him to it. It’s hard and frustrating at times… He got banished to bed early tonight because there was a dessert option that he really wanted but he wouldn’t eat enough dinner to be permitted dessert, so he started acting out. I’m trusting that the framework we’re putting in place will pay off in time, as he grasps that it’s up to him to eat as much or little as he wants, but that dessert is never an option if he hasn’t finished dinner. He’s nearly four so this isn’t outside his capabilities.
It’s hard to send them to bed knowing they haven’t eaten enough and that they’ll be waking up sometime through the night to demand food, especially when you’re a busy person with a job to get up to in the morning. Sympathies 
Another vote for letting her steal the vegetables off your plate. ‘I’ll just leave this carrot here and come get it in a minute… HEY!! Where did my carrot go? Is it in my glass? Is it under the table? Did YOU eat that carrot? There’s a CARROT THIEF in this house!!’
I’m strongly against letting food be a locus for power play - I think it sets up a really bad mindset. We don’t do ‘you can’t have that unless you eat this’ because it reinforces the idea that you would never eat the second thing voluntarily. I’ve read recent research saying the same thing - kids who have to eat their vegetables before they can have dessert are more likely to think that vegetables are disgusting, because logically they must be, if you only eat them for a reward.
We also don’t do the clean-plate thing. I think it’s more important for them to develop a sense of when they’ve had enough than to finish what we give them. We’re very big on trying a bite of everything, but you don’t have to finish it.
My five-year-old loves vegetables (specially frozen ones. Still frozen). The toddler is more ambivalent, but she’ll eat them, specially if they’re given to her first, so she can nibble at them while she waits for the main dinner to be ready. Sometimes the peas say ‘Eat me! Eat me!’ in squeaky little voices.
re: Mac & Cheese: my older kid demands that when I make mac & cheese, I bury broccoli under the pasta in her bowl and tell her the story about the time a watch shrank us all down to the size of macaroni noodles and made us look through her mac & cheese cauldron to find her earring (what can I say, desperation breeds invention). I tell her part of the story, then wait until she eats another bite before telling her the next part.
I guess what I’m saying is, who goddamned even knows what will work? Different kids, different strategies; my overall strategy is to throw things at the wall to see what will stick.
That’s my toddler’s strategy, too, except I do it metaphorically.
I’m lucky ini that my 5 y/o had always loved veggies, and tries just about anything I put in front of him. His first food word was “gweeb beeens.”
Still, some days he decides he’s not eating what’s on the table, or he dawdles long enough I throw it out.
Those days I tell him well, I won’t starve you but you’re not getting something else to eat. He can have all the plain bread and water he wants.
ETA it does sound like OP is getting screwed by the grandparents. Nuggets and macn cheese are crack to toddlers. One they get a steady dose, they don’t want anything else.
When my kids were going through that phase, I would introduce new and different veggies (parsnips, raw spinach, artichoke) for them to Q Q at, alongside their usual sides of carrots and corn and peas. Sometimes it helped to have something REALLY disliked alongside something that was sorta-disliked to make the latter look better by comparison. I also had no problem stacking the deck by making the carrots, corn and peas irresistible to toddlers by giving them a nice shot of honey and mixing it in with a pat of butter. Once they were reestablished with the honey buttered veggies, I’d start backing off on the honey butter over the course of a few weeks.
I was also not opposed to making puree veggies and sneaking mass quantities of them into baked goods - brownies can hide black beans and spinach puree and still taste delicious, for instance.
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Give her dip. Ketchup, salad dressing, yogurt, hummus, it doesn’t matter. Anything can be a dip and anything can be dipped into a dip (carrots, fruit, broccoli, etc.). Yes, she will probably suck the ketchup off the carrot, but eventually, she will eat the carrot.
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Do snacks wisely. No junk. Snacks can be cheese sticks or deli meat roll ups. They can be veggies and dip. They can be fruit skewers (with yogurt dip).
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Let her help with the prep work. No, she can’t cut the broccoli, but she can help wash it in the sink, or spin the lettuce in the spinner. She can help skewer the fruit on a bamboo skewer, or stir the ingredients for hummus (or dump it into a bowl).
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Stop making a big deal about it. She WILL eat when she gets hungry. Don’t use tricks, ploys, threats, bargains, or worse yet LYING “This is only for adults” to get her to eat. Food shouldn’t be a battle. Make it a battle now, you might be met with a teen or adult with food issues.
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Expose her to different foods over and over and over. It may take several tries for her to decide she likes eating a particular food, and her tastes will change over time. What she loves today, she might not like tomorrow, and vice versa.
I had three kids who were exposed to tons of different foods and they are all three serious foodies as adults, who love trying new foods.
When Hallboy was in preschool, the class made a “cookbook” of the favorite things they had at home and how to make them. There were tons of hotdogs and mac and cheese with instructions like “open the box”. Hallboy’s selection? Artichokes. At three, he gave detailed instructions on how to eat an artichoke. (Peel off the outer leaves, dip in butter, run it through your teeth to get the meat at the end, etc.)
Quit letting chicken nuggets, Jello, Cheetos, and macaroni and cheese into your house. She’s a toddler. She can’t go out and buy her own. Cut out any juice, soda, chocolate milk, or any other high-calorie snack that is suppressing her appetite at meals, then serve her only the things you think she should be eating. Don’t make a big fuss over it or praise her for eating. If she doesn’t eat and cries for something else, just tell this is the meal, and if she doesn’t want to eat it, that’s her choice. If she throws a fit, just wait it out, do not try to appease or bargain with her. If she misses a meal and wakes up in the middle of the night hungry, offer her some vegetables. Keep a cooked sweet potato or something like that handy in the fridge for this purpose. Don’t let waking up to snack in the middle of the night become a habit, of course, but even food you might otherwise avoid tastes pretty great when you are hungry.
When she is regularly eating healthy foods, having chicken nuggets or macaroni and cheese occasionally will not be a big deal, but these should not be everyday foods.
A complication is that she spends a great deal of time at her grandmother’s house, and there isn’t a lot I can do about what she eats there- she’s raised three kids and she’s not about to listen to me.
Grandmother cooks a lot of homecooked food, so I can trust it will even out eventually. But for now, we will have to work around the occasional jello and cheeto.
Our cat changed her mind about not liking her new food rather quickly when it became clear that was all she was getting. Then again, she doesn’t have a saboteuse grandmother mucking things up.
How do I get my toddler to eat veggies?
Chocolate sauce.
When my daughter was a toddler she ate lima beans mixed into coffee yogurt every day for several years. She loved it! Not sure how that got started.
I don’t know whether I have any real advice except that in the whole scheme of things food might not be the most important thing to do battle about. If you are not starving them or feeding them fast food every night I think you are doing ok. The real battles come when they are teenagers
Ask grandma to help out by feeding only healthy food. If she insists that her opinions trump yours and in completely intractable on the subject, she is not a good choice of sitter.
Serve the veggies in long-stem desert dishes. The ones my friend used were thick glass, so pretty durable, but I’ll bet you could find some plastic ones. Anytime my friend served something new to her toddlers, she put it in them and the kids always tried it.
We have a similar grandma situation. I accept it by using it to make the point that different people eat different kinds of things, but what other people eat in their houses doesn’t affect what we eat in our house.
The best thing I have found is to:
- make sure my kid was HUNGRY for dinner
- prepare the veggies first, and then put out the veggies and say something like “the pasta is still cooking, but if people are very hungry RIGHT NOW, they could start on these veggies.” Sometimes my daughter wouldn’t touch them, but usually she would have at least some, and sometimes it was a lot. And I didn’t comment much on that, either way. For me, at least, the gushing over the eating sets up the power play for when they don’t eat, if that makes sense.
The personal irony here is that I’m not an intuitive cook, and it took me years to master the skill of having all the food finished at the same time. Oh well.
Cheese and veggies quesadillas also worked for me for getting some green stuff in her, I started with extremely small amounts of finely chopped vegetables – much less than you’d use to make a quesadilla for an adult – with plenty of cheese, and gradually upped the vegetable content.
I second/third etc the suggestion about dips. Mushed peas can also BE a dip.
You’re probably already doing this, but just a mention of trying different temperatures and textures. My daughter likes her green beans almost raw, but broccoli steamed until it’s almost falling apart.
This is not my parenting style at all, but some women in my neighborhood moms group have raved about it. I’m all for trying anything once if you feel you’re in dire straights:
Oh, I thought you were going to link to this plate. We had the girl and boy versions. Lots of fun!
How about not worrying about whether she eats veggies? If she’ll eat a kiddie multivitamin, she’ll get her vitamins. She can learn to like veggies later - and probably not that much later, given that she steals them off your plate occasionally.
My kid sister basically didn’t eat vegetables until she was in her mid-teens. Now she’s in her mid-fifties, and if it had any consequences, we sure haven’t noticed any. The Firebug, who will turn eight this summer, eats a wide variety of fruits, but the only veggie he’ll eat is carrots. But he’s the healthiest kid around.
You’ll have plenty of other battles to fight as a parent. You can skip this one if you choose, and that would be my recommendation.