Hello everyone!
I would just like to ask for some suggestions on how to help my kids eat vegetables. I’ve been trying to feed them variety of menus with veggies but they also leave them out and just eat the meat.
Any ideas?
Thank you so much in advanced!
How old are they and how long has this been going on?
I put vegetables like carrot and broccoli etc into the food processor to liquify them and then put it in with pancake mix and cook pancakes. Our little girl wont eat them otherwise.
It’s so easy to hide vegies. Make some pastry rolls (a bit of minced meat and lots of grated carrots and zuucchinis) Or maybe cornish pasties. Seriously, if you haven’t figured out a way to sneak vegies into your kid’s food, you aren’t trying very hard.
:dubious:
Bribery, begging, forcing, crying, daring, luck. Anyway that works.
The lil’wrekkers veggie appreciation was zip. I did all those things with very few happy results. She grew up anyway. She’s 20yo and is still a picky eater.
Quit buying unhealthy options or leave them where the kids can’t find them. When they say they are hungry hand them a carrot or apple at them and say eat this. If they don’t eat it then they really are not hungry and probably just bored. Explain that to them, that eating food isn’t something you do just to have something to do. Try adding melted cheese to vegetables.
[Moderating]
Welcome to the SDMB, Squid_Baby. We have different forums for different sorts of threads. This question isn’t really one with factual answers, so it doesn’t really fit in General Questions. Ordinarily, requests for advice go in the IMHO forum, but since this is about food, and a lot of the answers are likely to involve recipes, I’ll move it to Cafe Society, instead.
I’d serve the kiddies meat only. Let them watch while the adults are enthusiastically eating vegetables along with the rest of the meal. Only give the children veggies as a reward.
My son was once afraid to swim.
The water made him wince.
Until I said he mustn’t swim:
S’been swimmin’ ever since!
Once this thread figures out the answer, let me know. Apparently I am just a big kid.
The majority of them taste terrible.
Why don’t we have a puking emoji?
That’s how I started out. Then, having them help with meal prep came next. Then, once my kids were old enough to reason with I asked them to really think about their food preferences. Eventually we had an agreement that any new food had to at least be tried. Once they tried a new food, if they could verbalize why they disliked the food, they never had to try it again. I think maybe they ended up just deciding it was easier to eat what was served.
The podcast Gastropod did an episode on the concept of Tiny Tastes, where you give the kid a ridiculously tiny piece of food, like the size of a grain of rice every day for 14 days. If they eat it, they get a sticker. Apparently, the size is so small, it’s actually very hard to assess taste or texture so often by the end of the 14 days, the kid wants a larger piece so that they can actually taste it and by that point they’ve become somewhat acclimated to eating the food. I don’t have kids, but I think the idea’s pretty cool.
As a kid who hated vegetables I say you just leave him alone and let him eat what he wants. Turning dinner into torture was one of my worst experiences as a child.
If they see other people eating them as a treat, not as a chore, that’s likely to be helpful.
Much of what’s in the grocery stores is tasteless, or sometimes actively bad tasting; it was bred for tonnage per acre and shipping quality, and harvested at whatever stage allowed it to ship with the least losses, and with minimal regard to the weather (see below). The cooking technique may also be an issue – some people like their vegetables, or some particular vegetables, well cooked; others like them almost raw.
Kids really do have different tastebuds than adults, and different people taste different things. There’s a substance in cabbage family crops that some people taste hardly at all and others very strongly. Most of these crops will taste better if harvested in cold weather; but to a person with strong sensitivity to that particular flavor they may still taste bitter. And there are a lot of odd food sensitivities that people may grow out of, if they’re not permanently repelled from the food by attempts to force them to eat it. Tomato sauces literally made me nauseated when I was a child; I love them now. My parents had a really good sense of the difference between a kid who really couldn’t stand something and one who just wanted to get to dessert; I never had to have more than a taste of something new, and not even that of something I knew I couldn’t stand – though after watching the grownups eat it with enthusiasm, I would often ask for an occasional taste to find out if I still didn’t like it. Usually, eventually, the answer was that the distaste had worn off – though ‘eventually’ sometimes took a number of years.
If possible, try having them grow some things themselves. Not only will this give them greater investment in thw whole idea, but you can get better flavor. Select varieties for flavor as well as for ease of growth. There is simply no comparison between peas of a good-flavored variety fresh out of the garden and minimally cooked (if cooked at all, many kids and adults will just graze on them) and what you can get in the store.
See, this is why I like canned green beans better than home grown green beans.
The canned ones are more tasteless an can be covered by enough salt.
Home grown green beans taste even MORE like GREEN BEANS. 
That absolutely wound’t have worked for me. For starters, I was one of those people that could tell if you changed the brand of one of the ingredients. For example, if you used a different ketchup for meatloaf or spanish rice, I would have asked why it tasted different. No one was hiding anything in my food. If I bit into a pastie and noticed the bright orange or green (assuming it was something unwanted), I might try to pick around it, but I likely wouldn’t have eaten it.
Second, and I understand this isn’t the case for the vast majority of people…when I was younger their were a handful of vegetables and fruits I absolutely despised. Peas, green beans, apples and a few others. My mom insisted I was just being picky and I’d try and try to eat them and couldn’t get them down. Found out about 30 years later I was allergic to them. Nothing serious, just oral allergy syndrome. I wasn’t going to choke or die, they just made my throat itch.
IME, the best way to get a kid to try vegetables is to find a way to make it more palatable. If hiding it in food works, that’s great, at least nutritionally. But I’d think you’d have a hard time getting them to eat it on their own. For me, it was about covering broccoli or cauliflower in cheese sauce. I still love broccoli and cauliflower, but don’t have any interest in drowning it in cheese. Similar things for other vegetables, asparagus with butter and parmesan cheese, mashed potatoes with gravy, carrots with butter, salt and sugar. Again, for me, after eating the vegetables like that, it was no big deal to eat them without all the extras of mixed into a dish without picking around them.
My way of dealing with it was to ignore it. Give them vitamins if you are worried, but the prevailing rule was “there’s dinner, take it or leave it” and don’t replace it with anything.
Both my kids are now healthy, vegetable-eating adults, and dinner time was a lot more pleasant. YMMV, which it always does with kids.
Regards,
Shodan
I mentioned in my previous post that I had/have a bunch of [mild] food allergies to certain fruits and vegetables. It’s had ramifications throughout my life. I’ve been doing allergy shots for unrelated reasons for a few years now. A while back I tried a bite of an apples and I was surprised my throat didn’t itch. However, I still can’t bring myself to eat one. In fact, I don’t eat any [raw] fruit at all. Fruit flavored is fine, cooked (as in jelly) is fine. At this point I think it’s mostly a texture thing.
OTOH, while I still actively dislike the taste of green beans and peas, I like vegetables. But again, they have to be cooked. For example, I could eat cooked carrots all day, but can’t stand the taste of raw carrots.
Li’lbro?
Wait… me? No allergies to fruits that I know of, but it turns out my list of food sensitivities matches almost exactly the list of stuff I hated when I was little. I’m not sure whether the lack of swiss chard and cauliflower in the list of sensitivities is due to not having one, or of those two not being part of the test. Note that there were other veggies I’d eat happily, and that while there are many fruits I don’t like or even dislike I was perfectly happy to chomp my way through a Granny Smith or Golden apple, or to eat half a kilo of pears in one sitting. Doctor Imaz is and will always be one of my personal heroes because he told my mother to stop trying to feed me the few items I hated and instead pile up the alternatives I had no problem with.
In my case, also add the “how can you call that cooking” option. I’ve always considered that boiling carrots was an abomination unto the carrot (ok, that solves it: Joey P and I are not each other’s socks): turns out I prefer vegetables parboiled or sautéed, where my mother was in the “boil them till they’re grey mush” field.
You can try serving them veggies first, the meat comes after they finish the veggies, but I would do a smaller veggie portion. Transition to them eating the veggies first on the same plate of their meat, letting them know it’s better to get the stuff they don’t like that much down first so they can enjoy the parts they like. But I would also keep the portions adjusted to their likely.
However they might just learn to cook for themselves and cook what they want, Which if they are so driven I’d let them eat as they wish, there is probably a reason if they are so driven to do so.
This is my view, as well. I grew up eating anything and everything on my plate. I don’t remember being forced to eat veggies, but I never got a choice with what I could eat. It was “take it or leave it.”
That said, with my kids (5 and 3), they’ve gotten to be picky eaters (which is somewhat disappointing, as the older one started out a complete omnivore and surprising me with the extent of her palate, and the younger one now has taken her cues from the older one). So I don’t force vegetables, and I can’t really hid them. Anything with a speck of green in it: it could be vegetable, it could be a little bit of parsley or dill, etc., and they will complain and not eat it. (The younger one might with a little coaxing if older one is not around.) I’m just happy if they get some protein in their diet, and I figure the rest will take care of itself. And they like their fruit, so there is that (and I can get each of them to sometimes ingest a vegetable; the younger one likes squash, and the older one sometimes will eat cauliflower or carrots.) But I don’t see anything to be gained by forcing it. As long as they get their nutrition otherwise, I’m fine with it.