Miranda: Eat those veggies...because I say so!

You know you want your kids to be healthy.
You know that a major part of that is getting them to eat right.
But what do you do if they don't like what you want to feed them?
How can you get your kids to eat healthy foods without a fight?

Tips time!

• Start young. Okay, maybe that's not the most helpful advice now, but if you have a young one in the family, start cultivating their taste buds for nutritious foods right now. If you can keep them off of sugar and processed foods from birth to age 6, it will be so much easier for them to avoid addiction to sugar and hatred of vegetables after age 6. Then they can have occasional indulgences--birthday party feasts, keep-the-peace treats--without suffering from an addictive pattern that leads to nightly fights for sugar.
  

• Give them a choice, not an order. If the demand is "no, you cannot have more cheese on your taco," then guess what.... You have just made more cheese on the taco the most important accomplishment in the whole world. This also applies to "eat your broccoli!" You have just made not eating the broccoli the most important mission of dinner. Instead, offer a choice. Allow your child to have some control over their diet rather than being forced into something they're happy to rebel against. "I know you love cheese, but we have lots of extra beans and we also have some chopped tomatoes. Which one do you want to add to your taco?" Instead of non-optional eating of broccoli, have choices and let your child choose which vegetable they would like. Even if all of the options are healthy options, the power of choice removes the instinctive desire to rebel against your demands.
  

• Don't make it such a big deal. If you're stressing over whether or not they're eating such and such, you're bringing stress to the situation. Children are very intuitive, and they will know how much it means to you, and their rebellion will amp up to be proportional with your distress. Don't preface the meal by announcing that you're serving that veggie they didn't eat last week, and how they better eat it tonight. Don't tell them how important it is, why they need to eat it, what consequences they will face if they don't. Unless you have an older child, the consequences of their dietary choices aren't really on the radar. All you are trying to do is to get some good food in them without making it such a big deal that they feel they are eating anything out of the ordinary.
  

• Involve your child in the food preparation. Let them choose some veggies from the store. Let them feel it, press it, smell it. Let them help you in the kitchen. Learn how to cook a new thing together. Let them sample it, help season it. Take it from being a scary vegetable into an awesome cooking project with the family! Make it be fun, not scary; known, not foreign.

• Practice what you preach. If you aren't practicing healthy eating habits, you're going to have a hard time forcing your child into eating differently than you. Teach by example. If you have to pretend to enjoy eating healthy foods, you can maybe get away with it if your acting skills are good enough. But be careful. Children see and understand much more than they are given credit for. If Mommy or Daddy really don't like eating healthy foods, it's going to be very difficult to convince the kids to do so. The very best way to develop healthy eating (and healthy lifestyle) habits in your children is to be a living example of health. If this is something that you struggle with, then perhaps your own health needs to be a higher priority.

This is not about being a food-ninja.

Unless it really is too late, and you have a child that is too sugar-addicted and vegetable-phobic to make much progress with, you shouldn't have to sneak vegetables into what you are cooking.

There are many tips out there if the above is the situation you find yourself in. I've seen many blogs offering advice on how to cook vegetables into pasta without notice, or how to bake greens into muffins with no one the wiser.

But I can't see how that's really helping anything.

You don't want to cultivate a continued fear of healthy food into your kids. There's nothing to be afraid of! Nutrition is life. Food is fun.

Instead of fear and drama around healthy eating, let's cultivate creativity, interest, and fun.