Five Mom-Approved Methods to Get Toddlers to Eat Vegetables
Toddlers can get picky, especially with their veggies, such as broccoli or spinach. But, despite their eating preferences, toddlers need to have balanced nutrition to develop and grow, and it does include a lot of vegetables.
Many parents struggle to get their kids to eat vegetables. Here are five methods that will help you pack your kid's meals with many vitamins and minerals from veggies!
#1 Involve the Kids into Cooking
Next time you are cooking, include your child in the cooking process. Start from shopping, let the child choose vegetables you'll cook, wash them, stir them, and do little tasks that will make them feel included in the food preparation.
Once the food is cooked, ask your child to help set the table, and garnish the plates. By having your child participate fully, from buying groceries to serving them to plate, you have higher chances that your toddler will continue with the flow and eat the meal, as it follows the process naturally.
Make a fun experience of it, especially if you add ingredients your child wouldn't eat regularly. It will help associate that food with a positive experience in the future!
#2 Never Force, but be Persistent
Forcing your child to eat vegetables can be counterproductive and make your child's meal stressful for both of you. In the future, your child can associate that specific vegetable with the anxiety and pressure from childhood, which will ruin healthy eating habits.
Instead of forcing, you can try the smart approach. It is called persistence.
Wait a couple of weeks or days to offer the vegetable your child refuses to eat. Serve it differently, and act as if you are offering it for the first time. One of those times, the kid will give in and eat it.
#3 Sneak Veggies
With toddlers, you need to get creative, as they are very innovative when it comes to rejecting food. By the age of two or three, most toddlers show food preferences. As a parent, you are probably aware of your child's eating patterns, the least favorite, and the most favorite foods.
Why not mix those two? For example, if your child only wants to eat spaghetti with meatballs, try to make spaghetti from zucchini, and meatballs from shredded carrots and other vegetables. You can try mixing spaghetti with vegetable meatballs or zucchini spaghetti with meatballs. Your toddler probably won't even notice the difference!
Avoid significant swaps in the recipes to prevent the child from noticing the change!
The key is in minor changes you can make to introduce new foods and increase the vegetable intake.
#4 Be Creative with the Presentation
Many chefs like to say: We eat with our eyes first. It is especially true for toddlers! Luckily, vegetables come in all sorts of colors and shapes you can use for a fun presentation. For example, you can build a happy face from vegetables. Use cherry tomatoes for eyes, steamed asparagus for nose, make lips from bell pepper, and serve broccoli as a hair! Not only will the plate be colorful and fun, but it will also be a powerful vitamin boost. Broccoli is a superfood because of its excellent health benefits, asparagus is rich in vitamins A, C, and K, and other veggies have many vitamins and minerals, too! You can search online for more ideas on how to garnish vegetables for a kid's meal.
#5 Serve Vegetables Prepared Different
There are several cooking methods you can use to prepare vegetables. You can steam, boil, blanch them, roast them and mix them with other ingredients.
One thing you can try is to prepare one vegetable in many ways. Then, get your child to pick one method you'll use in the future. That way, you'll have your child feel as if he or she is in charge because he'll get to choose his meals.
Don't Take the Easy Way
The easiest thing you can try is to bribe the kid by offering a reward once they eat vegetables. It might be the most effective way to get your toddler to eat vegetables, but it certainly isn't a sustainable one or a long-term solution.
Avoid bribing because it can make you more trouble in the future because toddlers learn from their experiences. Instead, try some of the mentioned methods and be patient. Often, refusing to eat vegetables is just a phase that many kids overgrow.
What are your tricks to get your child to eat vegetables? Please like and share the article to help more parents overcome parenting challenges!
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