If you have children, then you may already know how difficult it can be to get them to adopt a healthy diet. Things are made even worse if they already picked up bad eating habits and you’re trying to make a change. But more often than not, children hate veggies not because of the veggies themselves but because of how they’re introduced to them. In this article, we’re going to give you a few tips on how to get your children to enjoy vegetables.
Get Them Involved
If you have garden space, try to get your kids to help you plant a vegetable garden in the backyard. You could even give them a small area just for them, so they can experiment. And usually, there will be a few vegetables that children will tolerate more than others, so get them to plant those and a few others as well, so they can expand their horizons.
Take them grocery shopping with you and let them look and touch various new vegetables. Children love new and shiny things and can’t help themselves to want to experiment, and if they see a vegetable that strikes their imagination, they will want to try it.
Change Your Own Habits and Approach
Many people complain that their kids don’t like vegetables but don’t eat them themselves. Children will naturally learn from their parents, so unless they see you enjoying vegetables yourself, chances are they won’t pick up the habit.
Another thing you could do is always have a few different veggies on the table and let them pick the veggies themselves. While not all kids love vegetables, there will always be one or two they like more than others. By giving them a choice, you’ll have a better chance of getting them to eat their daily portion of vegetables.
Make them Interesting
If you want to turn your kids away from vegetables, make sure you to serve them a piece of steamed broccoli or brussels sprouts; you’ll traumatize them forever. There are plenty of ways that they can get their daily serving of vegetables without making it bland and uninteresting. For instance, most children might not be excited by eating a bowl of kale salad, but you could easily hide it in a delicious bowl of Zuppa Toscana and they’ll gladly eat it up and even ask for seconds. It’s all about being creative and finding a way to mix vegetables into recipes they are likely to love.
Another way you can do that is by adding a pureed vegetable to pasta sauce. Some kids will have a tendency to remove grated veggies from pasta sauce, so if you manage to puree them, they won’t be able to see them while enjoying all the nutritional benefits. Or, you could even puree vegetables like carrots and zucchinis and add them to burger patties and they won’t see the difference.
Conclusion
All these tips should allow you to not only get your children to eat their vegetables but make them vegetable lovers for life.
Brought to you by our friend, Carol.