Let’s call it like it is. Life is pretty nuts right now. I could use many other words as well, but I’ll stick with that for the sake of time.

Getting your kids to eat their veggies might feel like a low priority, especially if you find yourself caught in the “food fight” with your kids. It might feel like one more thing that you just don’t have the energy to tackle.

I get it. My daughter ate yogurt and granola and a piece of frozen pizza for dinner last night. This is real life.

The good news is, it doesn’t need to be all or nothing. You can still focus on doing your very best, even in these unprecedented times. And the best thing? Getting a few extra veggies into your kid over the course of the week can feel like something positive you actually can control. Just don’t put too much pressure on yourself, or them, and you can actually enjoy the process!

What We Will Cover Today

Today’s post will review why it’s a great time to focus on healthy eating and some quick and easy science-backed tips to help your kid (and you!) eat more vegetables and have fun in the process.

So take a deep breath, read on, and pick one small thing you can do in the next week to reduce the food fight and make vegetables a fun part of mealtime.

Why Focus on Your Kid’s Eating Now?

There are many good reasons. A few are:

1. Families are spending more time together. Without parents and kids spending less time outside the home, there is more opportunity for family meals. This gives parents a greater opportunity to bring awareness to the family’s habits and change the conversations around food.

2. People are realizing more than ever how precious our health is. We only get one body to live in. Healthy eating is an excellent way to help your body have the best immune functioning possible which can help you recover more quickly from illnesses.

3. Healthy eating is something positive that we can focus on. As I mentioned above, there are a lot of things that are out of our control, especially lately. However, our shopping and eating choices are still something over which we have control and it can make a big difference for ourselves and our family.

4. It can actually reduce fights about food, and therefore reduce stress. Yes, you heard right. If you were worried that focusing on getting your kids to eat well would increase fights at the dinner table, the opposite is actually true. Ellyn Satter, a dietitian and psychotherapist, refers to the strategy as the “Division of Responsibility” in eating, where the parent decides when, what, and where to eat, and the child decides whether to eat and how much. When done right, the strategies for increasing healthy eating should actually reduce stress about eating and improve your child’s relationship with you and with food. What a bonus, right?

Who Is This Post For?

Think your kid is too old to change? Learning these principles will help increase healthy eating in everyone from babies to young adults. In fact, the more you learn about human behavior and eating preferences, the more you can support your loved ones of any age end the food fight and learn to enjoy balanced and healthy eating.

And what better way to take control of your and your family’s health than that.

Even if you are an adult who never plans to have children, how we promote healthful eating in children is similar to how we should promote it in adults. So if you are interested in improving your health, stay tuned.

If you are feeling overwhelmed with having one more task to do, remember that these strategies can be used gradually. Even before you change what you are eating, changing the conversation around food can be practiced starting now with minimal effort.

Any of These Comments Sound Familiar?

“Good job for eating your carrots, sweetie. They will make you big and strong.”

“If you finish your broccoli, you can have dessert.”

“You have to finish everything on your plate because there are some kids who don’t get enough to eat.”

What Do These Statements Have in Common?

They are well-intentioned comments that encourage or give kids an incentive to eat something healthy. Most of us have used some version of the above.

We do what we need to do to get our kids to eat their veggies right?

The problem is, convincing your kid to eat a bit of broccoli today with a bribe (with dessert, or screen time), while it might feel like a win, might actually be priming them to like veggies less over time.

Ideally, we want to set our kids up to like veggies beyond the time they are living under your roof.

Pop Quiz

If you gave your kid vegetables and told them the veggies:

1. Were tasty
2. Would make them strong or
3. Were tasty and would make them strong

Which statement do you think would help the kid eat more veggies and enjoy them the most?

If you are like me, you guessed number 3. In that option, the kids learn that veggies are tasty and make them strong. Aren’t two positives better than one?

What they actually found was, the kids in the group #1 (who were told the vegetables are tasty) ate the most, while the other two groups ate less (Maimaran & Fishbach, 2014). Even when kids are told the veggies are tasty and will make them strong, they eat less than just being told they are tasty alone (Maimaran & Fishbach, 2014).

I was surprised by this, but it actually makes sense based on what we know about human motivation. The more we give external rewards or reasons for certain behaviors, the less we enjoy the actual behavior itself. Our brains seem to think something like “If I’m eating this vegetable to get strong, I must not really like it.”

So if we are eating veggies for a specific goal (getting big and strong, or getting some extra screen time, for example) we are less likely to enjoy the experience than just because we chose to eat that food because we liked it.

Kids: The Original Intuitive Eaters

As I have discussed, becoming an intuitive eater, or re-learning how to listen to your body’s internal signals of hunger and fullness is a worthwhile goal. Intuitive eaters tend to gain less weight over time, have a healthier relationship with food, and less disordered eating (Augustus-Horvath & Tylka, 2011).

If you would like a free 3-day journal to get started with this, grab my free guide here!

Kids at one point all had this ability, but our culture’s focus on what they “should” eat, dieting, and hyper-palatable foods (like extremely sugary cereals and other processed foods), have stripped this ability from many kids from a young age.

The good news is, they have the ability to get it back. And the strategies below can help.

9 Ways to Get Your Kids to Eat More Vegetables (and Have Fun While Doing it!)

1. Make fresh veggies (and fruit!) readily available and looking great. If you want your kids to naturally gravitate to a wide variety of veggies (or other healthful food), you need to make them available as often as you can. Prepare them in different ways and make them look as tasty as possible. Have veggies cut up and in the front of the fridge and fresh fruit out in a bowl on the counter.
2. Continue to offer the veggies over and over in different ways. Ever have your kid tell you they don’t like a certain food they literally just ate yesterday? My 3-year-old does this all the time. She loves plain carrots but decides they are yucky when cut up and in a pasta dish. The next day when I offer roasted carrots as a topping to put on her quinoa bowl, she loves them again. Keep offering and making veggies available regardless of whether your kids have said they liked it in the past. Research suggests that college students are more likely to like foods that were presented in their homes growing up, even if they did not like them as a child (Wadhera, Capaldi Phillips, Wilkie, & Boggess, 2015)! So don’t give up, even just offering the foods is worth the effort. And as the parent, you will be eating them too right? (see tip #3) So you wont need to worry about food waste.
3. Model healthful eating often. That’s right parents, if you want your kids to eat a wide variety of vegetables, you need to as well. And guess what? The same advice for kids applies to you, keep on trying it over and over. You know when you are quietly trying to grab a snack and hide it from your kids so they wont want to share with you? Try doing that with carrots and hummus, or other fresh veggies. You might be surprised how curious they get about what you are having. And at the table, they should be seeing you eat (and looking like you enjoy!) a wide variety of healthy options on a regular basis. If this is hard for you, model having a good attitude and being open to trying new things even if you don’t always love it right away. You might say “I’m trying this new food to see if I like it. I think it’s fun to try new things.”
4. Avoid pressure to eat. Give up the food fight. Offer several healthful options on a regular basis, but don’t push it. Research suggests that pressure to eat reduces the liking of that food and increases child pickiness (Ventura & Birch, 2008). If they don’t want it your response should give the message of “alright, no big deal.” Even better than offering, I have found that if I sit at the table and eat a novel food without offering it, my daughter will ask to have it even if she has no idea what it is. This seems to have a much higher success rate because she is initiating the request versus me encouraging her to try some.
5. Avoid food restriction. Parental restriction of food is associated with kid’s preoccupation with that food, emotional eating, weight gain and disordered eating over time (Rodgers et al., 2013, Ventura & Birch, 2008). Instead of restricting unhealthy options, try to set up your environment so they are less available on a regular basis (e.g., don’t buy them often, or buy just enough so each family members gets one serving).
6. Involve your kids in the meal planning, shopping, and cooking process. This is one of my favorite tips and I think the number one thing that has helped get my daughter to eat vegetables, particularly as she got into her toddler years. As often as I can, I have her “help me cook.” This means she climbs up on a step ladder (there are also stools specifically made for this) and watches me chop veggies and other foods for dinner. She requests tastes of the various things she sees and I put them into a bowl in front of her. As it turns out, eating veggies while standing on a step ladder is super fun, and she eats way more than she typically does sitting at the table. The bonus benefit is that this made cooking way more fun for me, and it was built in entertainment for both of us.
7. Relax, and be patient with your kids and yourself. Like most things, this is a process. With persistence, you can do it but be patient with yourself and your kids. If you find yourself falling back into old habits or repeating some of the bribing statements above, you are like every parent out there, and you are still doing a great job. It’s truly about the overall picture, not any one meal. So take a deep breath, regroup, and try to have fun with the process and make gradual improvements over time.
8. Get support. Parents of overweight children are more likely to report that lack of support from their spouse as a barrier to healthy eating (Nepper & Chai, 2016). If you and the other main caregivers are not on the same page about this, it can make this much harder. Remember, you all have the same goal which is the physical and emotional health of the child. Try to approach them from a place of working together. Send them this article and say “I read some interesting things about feeding kids, what do you think about this? Any thoughts on how we can implement this with [your kid’s name]?” It’s important to start a conversation in a non-critical way. Work to brainstorm ways all caregivers can work together to increase your kid’s liking and choosing of healthy foods.
9. Eat as a family. In many studies, kids who eat more meals at home had significantly lower rates of obesity 10 years later (Berge et al., 2015). However, this did vary by race and ethnicity and some studies found that family meals were protective in some groups (e.g. African American boys) but not in others (e.g. Hispanic boys) (Rollins et al., 2010). Common sense and the research on modeling healthy eating would suggest that this is going to be most helpful if you are sitting down to balanced meals, versus sitting down to pizza or take out each night. I would also imagine that family meals are most helpful when they are focused on the conversation and connection opportunity versus solely on the reward offered by the food.

I Would Love to Hear from You!

What has helped you get your children to eat their veggies? Which part of this do you struggle with the most? How can I support you? If you try some of the strategies above, what works and what doesn’t? Comment below or send me a message at info@drshawnhondorp.com!

References

Augustus-Horvath, C. L., & Tylka, T. L. (2011). The acceptance model of intuitive eating. A comparison of women in emerging adulthood, early adulthood, and middle adulthood. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 58, 110–125.

Berge, J. M., Wall, M., Hsueh, T., Fulkerson, J. A., & Larson, N. (2015). The protective role of family meals for youth obesity: 10-year longitudinal associations. The Journal of Pediatrics, 166, 296-301.

Maimaran, M., & Fishbach, A. (2014). If it’s useful and you know it, do you eat? Preschoolers refrain from instrumental food. Journal of Consumer Research, 41, 642–655.

Nepper, M. J., & Chai, W. (2016). Parents’ barriers and strategies to promote healthy eating among school-age children. Appetite, 103, 157-164.

Rodgers, R. F., Paxton, S. J., Massey, R., Campbell, K. J., Wertheim, E. H., Skouteris, H. & Gibbons, K. (2013). Maternal feeding practices predict weight gain and obesogenic eating behaviors in young children: a prospective study. International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity, 10, 24.

Rollins, B. Y., Belue, R. Z., & Francis, L. A. (2010). The beneficial effect of family meals on obesity differs by race, sex, and household education: The National Survey of Children’s Health, 2003-2004. Journal of the American Dietetic Association, 110, 1335-1339.

Ventura, A. K., & Birch, L. L. (2008). Does parenting affect children’s eating and weight status? International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity, 5, 15.

Wadhera, D., Capaldi Phillips, E. D., Wilkie, L. M., & Boggess, M. M. (2015). Perceived recollection of frequent exposure to foods in childhood is associated with adulthood liking. Appetite, 89, 22-32.