If she genuinely dislikes vegetables and has pickiness as an intrinsic part of her personality, it is what it is. We don’t choose our kids.
But if she’s just falling in to some habits and can be guided to a more balanced way of eating, I think it is my duty to foster that. I have a teenage cousin who eats little more than white carbs. At thanksgiving dinner, the only item he is willing to eat is the rolls. He’s healthy enough and a great kid, but it’s a burden and he will face limitations for the rest of his life.
Each meal need not contain every “food group,” plus I can limit the quantities of less-healthy food. Plenty of broccoli for everyone, but only a small piece of bread each, for example.
I also observe people’s specific pickinesses and take care to work around them to some degree. If someone hates onions, I may prepare them on the side rather than contaminate a whole dish with them or I will purposely cut them in large pieces to make them easy to pick out.
I love to cook and seldom make the same thing the exact same way twice. Kids get in a dietary rut easily and resist when a dish they are used to isn’t quite the way it usually is. I figure this can’t happen if there is no “usually” and make an effort to avoid consistency, which also keeps cooking fun instead of drudgery. I love the challenge of preparing foods people think they don’t like in ways that they are surprised to find delicious. A lot of vegetable-haters encountered some mushy boiled version of a vegetable once, didn’t like it, and have no idea how delicious it might be roasted or sautéed with a bit of olive oil and garlic.
I also make sure to prepare food for picky children in child-bite-sized pieces. Cutting food up can be a tedious struggle for a child and if it’s something they aren’t crazy about, they won’t want to bother. Serve it in appetizing little pieces when possible, don’t just cut it up on their plate at the table.
My child is now a grown-up who delights in getting her picky friends to try new things.
It’s likely her just asserting her ability to choose and stick with those choices.
My older son (3.5) is much the same way, in reverse. He’ll drink milk, occasionally eat yogurt and cheese, and pretty much eat vegetables and things like rice or potatoes. He does like mac and cheese, but we don’t have it often.
Meat? Only rarely will he sit down and eat chicken nuggets, or hamburgers or things like that, and won’t even consider most other things like sausage or steak or grilled chicken.
But he’s adventurous enough; that kid will chow DOWN on some xiao long bao and potstickers at our local Chinese place. As in, he’ll eat all the juicy dumplings if we’d let him. And he’ll eat chips and rather hot salsa, rice and flautas at our local Tex-Mex place. It’s like he doesn’t realize meat is in those things, or likes them enough to eat them anyway.
We don’t worry about it; he’s not fat (can see his ribs), but is still growing like a weed and our pediatrician says he’s doing quite well.
Or you don’t offer the noodles (or whatever the favorite food is) at all the meals. Breakfast can be eggs and cheese and lunch can be veggies and dip and dinner can be a nice whole grain pilaf with protein and diced veg and snacks can be fruit.
You’re close. You’re so close. But you’re still giving the kid more power then they really have. They have the power to decide how much to put in their mouth. But you have all the power, when they’re with you, to decide what they have *available *to put in their mouth.
Also, remember that a toddler doesn’t need much food, period, and needs more carbs than anything else. The growth is suddenly slowing, so they need fewer proteins to build muscle and fewer things with calcium (like dark leafies and broccoli) to build bones. They still need some, of course, but not very much over a week. Usually both protein and calcium, as well as fat, are covered by a couple of glasses of milk or servings of whole milk yogurt, anyhow. What they really need at this stage from food is carbs, for energy.
There’s a reason they love the noodles and the breaded chicken bits and the toast and the cereal snacks - they’re straight up fuel. So boil whole grain noodles with some vegetables in the water, and some vitamins will stick. (If you don’t like boiled vegetables, then save your peels and ends for pasta water and toss them when cooked; essentially you’re making veggie stock simultaneously with cooking the noodles.) Put some jam or avocado on the toast. Make a veggie puree dip for the chicken nuggets (and make the chicken nuggets out of chicken with wheat germ breading). Throw out the cereal snacks; we all eat too many processed grains, there’s no need to add more at snack time.
And don’t sweat what they’re getting at Grandma’s. Humans are omnivores. We can handle a surprising amount of crap in our bellies, just like pigs. Trying to control her is a recipe for disaster and may lose you a willing babysitter. Just eat like you want to eat at home, and trust that your efforts there will buffer the junk at Grandma’s.
I agree with a lot of this, but I think you’re on the wrong track with the carbs. Those carbs are why many kids don’t eat their protein and vegetables. Hunger is kept at bay with a day of snacking on juice, Goldfish crackers, Cheerios, and fruit snacks. None of these things are horribly bad in moderation, but when a child sits down to lunch or dinner and is not hungry, they will pick at the meal and eat only their favorite bits.
Sure, the kid can be functional and seem healthy even with a crappy diet, but if you are in the US, you don’t have to look far to find kids, teens and adults who are suffering from their food choices. The habit of a carb-heavy diet is difficult to break.
You aren’t just feeding the child, you are creating eating habits for the future adult. Why set them up for diabetes and obesity?
Alas, vitamins are not going to leave vegetable scraps and soak into your pasta in any significant quantity, unfortunately. You can create a useful broth to add flavor to a sauce or soup this way, but even the broth itself is not going to be much of a source of nutrients.
So give the child a supplement because of your own irrational worries? I’d rather just get a grip on reality. I’m not a pirate living on a ship, so I have plenty of access to fruits and vegetables to serve any landlubbing tots around.
Horseshit is no doubt high in fiber, but is subjected to even less oversight than nutritional supplements. I don’t recommend it as a safe source of nutrients, but it does make good fertilizer.
Of course they will. Tea steps in 5 minutes and the water isn’t even boiling. Water soluble vitamins leave the cells very quickly as the cell walls are broken down by heat and agitation. Cook the pasta in a minimum of water and you’ll have a nice little supplement. Should it replace encouragement of eating actual vegetables, of course not. But it’s an additional strategy.
Yeah, until the kid goes through the phase where NO FOODS CAN TOUCH BECAUSE YUCKY!!
My kid (5) is just leaving that stage, and it seems to be a pretty common one among my friends’ kids. We’ve finally gotten to the point where I can serve her pasta with a sauce! What the heck, I thought all kids liked tomato sauce! My kid likes tomato sauce too, it turns out… just not served mixed with pasta. (Being able to dip it is great!) I’m so looking forward to being able to give her casseroles again.
It’s also sort of amazing that cooking with mommy and daddy, which didn’t work at all when she was 2-3, works really great now. She’ll try something she would ordinary turn up her nose at because she was the chef and therefore it must taste yummy! (Whereas at age 3, she still loved to help mom and dad cook but it didn’t translate into wanting to eat the food afterwards.)
Some quantity of vitamins leave the vegetables and enter the water, but a few minutes of boiling in that water is not going to have any real nutritional effect on your pasta. Even the broth itself is going to contain very little nutrition, but I’m sure there is no harm in this practice, so WhyNot, I guess…
What’s that got to do with forcing your alergic to capsaicins son to eat his peppers, or your daughter who throws up whenever she eats cauliflower to eat her cauliflower? The first is medical, but the second is “pickiness”, right?
Doctor Imaz is still my favorite doctor, because he told Mom to stop forcing my brother to eat things that gave him a rash and forcing me to eat the handful of things I couldn’t stand.
I mean, I do not have any international child-feeding experience, but I understand the OP has done quite a bit of work overseas in third-world countries. How do parents handle this there? If it doesn’t come up in Africa or China, why not?
It does come up overseas. In fact, I think kids in developing countries tend to be pickier about new food, probably because they are used to a more limited diet. I cooked around a lot of moderately hungry kids in Cameroon, but I couldn’t get any of them to try my homemade ricotta or my homegrown radishes.