One question I routinely get when posting our weekly menu plans is how we get our kids to eat healthy foods.
Before I explain, I want to give you a bit of background about my experience with food growing up as well as my husband’s. (If you really don’t care about our experience, go ahead and skip to the last section of this post to get to the meat of how we feed our kids healthy foods. You won’t hurt my feelings, I promise!)
My Experience with Food Growing Up
I was a fussy child, as was my mom, so the foods I ate growing up were rather limited. We had the basic fruits like apples, grapes, and bananas, but we only had peaches and pears out of a can because my mom didn’t like the way they felt; specifically she didn’t like the fuzz on the peaches. I didn’t even try kiwi until college.
Our meals were simple homestyle meals like macaroni and cheese, scalloped potatoes with a cheesy sauce, roast with mashed potatoes and carrots–you get the idea. Standard American fare. Our vegetables came from freezer bags or cans.
We didn’t eat out much, so we did eat at home, but it wasn’t the healthiest fare. My guess is that my experience is not unique among those in my generation. While I was not fat during my childhood and teen years, I was always chubby.
My doctor guesses that I probably had trouble with dairy all of my life and never knew it. By my teen years, I was having trouble digesting some foods like pizza, but I thought that was due to the fat, not the cheese.
My Husband’s Experience Growing Up
Sometimes I think my husband’s mom is Wonder Woman. She worked 6 days a week, often 10 to 12 hour days, and then she would come home and spend an hour or two making several small dishes to serve at dinner. Her meals were always very heavily concentrated around fresh vegetables.
Even now when she calls to talk to my husband and kids, she will routinely urge them all to eat their vegetables. “Eat well, sleep well” is her mantra, and my husband is fond of reciting it too.
You can imagine that when we married, there were some food conflicts. I began to eat more fresh vegetables and fruits, and my husband begrudgingly began to eat one dish casseroles.
A Dairy Intolerance Begins to Change the Food We Eat
Of course, everything changed in 2010 when I discovered I couldn’t have dairy. A few months later we discovered our daughter couldn’t have it either, and then the next year that my son couldn’t.
If you look back to early food posts in this blog, you will see that the recipes I shared were heavy on cheese and processed foods like canned cream of something soup. I also loved my carbs.
The funny thing is that I thought we were eating healthy, and I guess we were compared to what I used to eat, but we still had a long way to go.
Once we cut out the dairy, we began to eat much healthier. Of course, kids love junk food, so it has been a bit of a struggle with my son who wishes he could still eat things like Cheetos, but he can’t thanks to his dairy intolerance.
How We Get Our Kids to Eat Healthy
For the most part, my 8 year old is a great eater and will eat almost anything put in front of him. He only has a few foods he doesn’t like such as squash and beets.
My 4 year old was our fussiest, but now she is learning to eat her food without complaining.
The 2 year old is also generally a good eater, but if she doesn’t like something (like blueberries), no amount of persuasion can get her to eat it.
Having said that, here are our strategies to get our kids to eat a wide variety of foods:
1. Make them take a certain number of bites of the food. You may have heard that a child might have to try a food 20 times before he begins to enjoy it. If we have a food the kids are reluctant to try or don’t like such as beets, they are required to take a certain number of bites, such as 5 or 10 bites or they don’t get dessert. (Our kids get one dessert a day at night such as a dye free sucker or a fruit strip.)
2. Serve them their vegetables first. We ran into a problem where our kids would eat all of the food they liked first and then say that they were full before they ate their vegetables. To combat this problem, for awhile we served them vegetables first, and they had to eat those before they got the rest of the meal.
3. Let them help prepare the meal. All of our kids like to help in the kitchen, so as time permits, I let them help me prepare the vegetables and the rest of the meal.
4. Get their input. My oldest child likes to browse cook books and pick recipes he likes. He also sits beside me and browses Pinterest for snack ideas. We have found some of his snacks and sides for his lunch by doing this. The more vested kids are, the more likely they are to eat the food.
5. Expose them to how food grows. Our kids all help us garden in the summer, and each week when I go to the farmer’s market, I take one kid with me. It is a special time for them, and they become more in touch with the natural state of food.
There you have, how we get our kids to eat healthy. Luckily, my kids haven’t grown up with much processed food, so they are better about eating simple, frugal meals than kids who grew up on boxed macaroni and cheese (like me) may be.
What is your favorite technique to get your kids to eat healthier?
I shared this post at Waste Not Want Not Wednesday #18
The biggest thing I’ve found is simply to start early. We’ve given both of our kids vegetables in some form since they were old enough to start eating table food, so they don’t know any other way. Our daughter (20 months) can get in picky stages, and when she does, refuses to touch the veggies. I’ve also noticed that she likes variety, and if you serve her the same veggie multiple meals running, her chances of eating it drop exponentially with each serving. Both of our kids love fruit.
Our kid is only 2 and he is a pretty good eater. We cook food for the adults and expect him to eat it too. If he refuse to eat it, then we’ll make him a PBJ a little later. We cook all kind of food and have pretty good success rate. Thanks for your tips. They will help when he’s older.
Thanks for the post! Our kids are almost 20 and one is 16. They are pretty good eaters too as I have fixed them fresh fruit and veggies for their lunches. We also garden and this exposed them to lots of vegetables. My biggest tip to get them to eat lots of vegetables is we serve them soup almost daily. Whatever the case, they do a pretty good job of choosing food items now they are teens. Thanks for sharing your experiences as they always are helpful to others!
Ahh – food battles. My middle daughter is such a challenge when it comes to food. We’ve tried the one bite rule, and she went 26 hours without eat a few times. We only “won” by sticking it in her mouth and making her chew. We have read a number of things that says to continue to model healthy eating, don’t cater to them, let them take as much or as little of what we have offered and they will eventually start to try things. I still struggle with the whole thing mentally. You have great ideas, but I just keep going back and forth with it all.
It is difficult and you have to do what is best for your child, but for us, a bit of tough love ultimately won out and helped shape their eating behaviors for the better.
I think this a great article. But I must say we tried this kind of stuff with my son. He is now 30 and he eats the worst, I mean the worst stuff, imaginable. My wife went shopping with him and there was not one vegetable in his cart. Fruits-forget about it.
So what to do about adults with these bad eating habits?
I had pretty bad eating habits too, but as it started to affect my health, I changed in a hurry.
It’s difficult to feed a child healthy foods especially when they don’t want to. But these are good tips here and want to try these tactics.
This is great advice! Something else that works for me is explaining exactly why some foods are unhealthy. We got started with this when my son was 3 and had a bad reaction to food coloring (stomach cramps and colorful diarrhea) in the free frosted cookie from a restaurant. I explained not only that food coloring can cause reactions and is not necessary, but also that the cookie was an “empty food” with no nutrition and that it contained “bad fat” that can hurt our blood vessels and upset our tummies. He has been somewhat careful of all these things since. Of course, he finds bright colors appealing, and he sometimes wants to eat super-sweet treats even if they’re unhealthy…but he recognizes that these are Sometimes Foods. He is 8 now and often comes home from school or birthday parties criticizing the food other kids think is acceptable! One thing we did have to teach him, though, is that it’s not polite to tell other people how unhealthy their food is while they are trying to eat!
As far as eating vegetables, my son likes some meals that are based on vegetables, like Red & Green Pockets, so I plan to serve these pretty often. He will eat about 5 “servings” of veg in a single meal like this, and then if he takes one grudging nibble of the veg side dish to the next day’s meal, I don’t need to stress about it because it balances out.
Excellent advice. We had that same chat with my son after dairy started upsetting his stomach so much. Still, it can be hard when he sees his friends bringing junk food to school every day.
This is all very good advice. I did all of this with my two daughters and they did well, until they became teenagers. Now my youngest wants nothing to do with most healthy foods. I thought that starting early (as soon as they started eating solids) would help to curb this behavior. Suggestions?
I think you have to give them a good foundation and then let them make their own choices. Eventually, she may come back to healthier eating, especially if she was exposed to a healthy diet earlier in life.
I love this so much! I have recently been focusing on teaching my 2 yr old how to eat good foods. She loves broccoli,tuna with lettuce in a salad, and lots of fruits. I am setting the example. Kids will follow your lead:)
Good for you! Your daughter will be grateful later when she is healthier.
I didn’t force my kids to eat anything when they were growing up as I had bad memories of my parents doing that. However, I didn’t serve them anything other than what we were eating. As they became adults, they now eat a wide variety of foods and one eats healthier than I do now.
I’m a fan of two of your ideas which are to have them help make the food and teach them where it comes from. Kids want to eat food they grow or cook.