Your child will eat vegetables if you do.
Do you enjoy vegetables?
Did your parents eat vegetables?
What did your parents do to make you eat them?
How did it make you feel?
Do you want your child to feel that way?
Vegetables are good for you. But making yourself or your child eat them is not good. That might work now, but later on you will both stop eating them. Instead, learn to enjoy vegetables. Your child will do the same. Keep in mind that you and your child don’t have to eat every vegetable!
Here is how to learn to enjoy vegetables:
- Sneak up on new foods like your child does. She looks but doesn’t taste, tastes but doesn’t swallow. Give yourself time. Like a new song, new food grows on you.
- Include new vegetables in meals again and again. It takes 10 to 20 tries to learn to eat a new food. Or more. Lots more. Have peas, beans, and corn sometimes, and have carrots or broccoli other times.
- Don’t get pushy. Everybody learns better when they can decide to eat or not.
- Make vegetables taste good. Dress them up with butter, cream, oil, bacon, fatback, white sauce, cheese sauce, herbs and spices, or brown sugar. Put vegetables in soups and stews.
- Cook vegetables the way you like them. Some people like them cooked until they are just barely soft. Others like them cooked until they are mushy.
- Don’t trick your child by sneaking vegetables into other food. Your child will catch on and not trust you. If vegetables are there, tell her.
- Know that some vegetables are harder to learn to enjoy. Broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower and some greens taste strong. Many people say they taste bitter. Tone them down with butter, salt, or sauces.
