Make Real Food Relevant to Kids
How to get healthy food down that little hatch? Make real food relevant to kids by teaching them about the benefits for their body, brain and activities
Most parents know kids should be eating more vegetables and less goldfish, more fruit and less juice boxes, more protein and less spaghetti-o’s. But how do you get them to eat what you serve? With goldfish and juice boxes it’s easy. Put them out for snack time and they get gobbled up. Why don’t celery sticks and apple slices fly off the plate and in the stomach like that? It’s not that they don’t taste good; it’s just that they don’t taste as good. Flavor is king. With sweet and salty snacks as comparisons, real food often comes up short.
What’s worked for my kids is making real food relevant to them. I connected the real food I was offering to their body, brain and activities. This gave them a reason to eat up.
Carrots give a kid energy to run and antioxidants to keep a big brain running smooth. Chicken grows a kid’s muscles to run fast and repairs the inevitable scraped knee. Almonds give a kid’s brain fat so they have good mood control. Olive oil and salmon help a kid’s brain remember all the letters of the alphabet or lyrics to their favorite song.
Before offering a new food or one they haven’t yet accepted, do some thinking. What do your kids use their body and brain to do? Think of a connection between the food they eat and the activities to articulate to your child. Plan to share this connection with your child when you offer a new or unaccepted food. If you’re stuck, use the internet. A keyword search on the Web with the food in question and “health benefits” or “brain function” will often give you the information you need.
Encourage Progress
Learning to eat real food is like learning to read. Kids need lots of practice and lots of encouragement. As parents, we don’t set the alphabet before our kids and expect them to read. Likewise, it often takes more than offering real food for it to be eaten. Even if your child has barely tasted a new food, consider that success and offer them praise for it. The most meaningful kind of praise is delivered when the activity you connected the food is underway.
When your kid is hollering “look at me” from the top of the playground, it’s a great opportunity to respond with “Wow, that celery stick gave you enough energy to get all the way to the top!”
When your kid brings home a perfect score on Friday’s spelling test, respond with “Wow, that salmon really did make your brain remember all the words perfectly.”
And when your youngest child waits patiently as her brother takes his turn on the computer, you can chime in with “Wow, those almonds really do keep your brain calm while you wait.”
Progress will eventually turn into success. You will be surprised how many kinds of real food you can get your kids to eat with this method.
What do you do to get real food down the hatch? Please share in the comment section!
This worked for me yesterday when my 5-yr-old came home from school in tears. Turns out she didn’t eat her lunch! I gave her some healthy snacks and put off homework until after dinner, and showed her how much better her brain worked and how much calmer she could be when her brain had the fuel it needed! Thanks for the post, Jenna.
We use a similar approach….I basically say we have two kinds of food GROW FOOD and SNACK/JUNK FOOD….no snacks until you eat grow food, and fast food is junk food, even though we still cave in when we are busy or aren’t prepared….but it helps to build that in their mindset that it’s not the same as a hamburger at home.
We never give up. Keep on trying. Just because they don’t like it today, doesn’t mean they won’t like it next week.
This works quite well at my house, too. Whether we’re eating a snack, cooking together, or having a meal, we talk about what we’re eating and why it’s good for us.
My kids are 5, 3, and 1. They went through a phase where they were resistant to eating bell peppers. I told them that bell peppers have antioxidants, and that antioxidants fight these “bad guys” called free radicals that roam around our bodies trying to make us sick. When we eat foods with antioxidants, they go into our bodies, find the bad guys and “Pow! Pow!” they knock ‘em out so they can’t damage our bodies anymore.
They each ate several strips of bell pepper right then and there. My daughter then said, “But Mommy, I don’t feel any ‘pow! pow’s!’” LOL! I told her they do it quietly.
I share all of this to just say that I DO believe this approach will work for many, many kids. I can’t tell you how many times my kids eat foods and then turn to me and flex so I can see their muscles, or open their eyes WIDE so I can “see” how much better their eyes work, etc.
Food CAN be fun!
I have been branching out and serving preferred foods in a different manner. My fussy eater would have no problems eating GF french fries so we offered steamed red potatoes cut like ‘coins.’ He could dip them in ketchup or put butter on them. This week, he tried mashed potatoes…since he liked red potatoes and fries…why not mashed? We also use ketchup as a dipper for veggies…although he complains, I can get him to eat steamed green beans occasionally! My other success that I am proud of is his current love for cantaloupe…he saw the sign said “candy cantaloupe” and he is convinced he is eating a type of candy…I will take anything this kid will give me!!!
Thanks for the wonderful blog…it’s always nice to have something to think about!!
I like that you related an activity that they like! My phrase is you will be strong and healthy. I don’t particularly like it when kids are told they will grow big. I feel like it encourages the attitude that bigger is best. My kids have little person genes (under 5’6 as adults) so I feel like it’s dishonest to tell them they will grow big! Or to make them feel like that is the goal– be big, when that may not be realistic for them– so I coined strong and healthy because that is more important to me. My biggest suggestion is keep trying — we aren’t perfect trying often really does help. I like to make big snack trays to offer things for my kids to eat for snack that they might not think of… dips like hummus, and veggies cut up from the veggie drawer, hard boiled eggs, etc.. I plunk the huge tray on the table and they eat up — alot of times if it’s benignly put in front of them they will try new things just cause someone else is eating it– a fav when we have new kids in the house cause kids who aren’t wanting to be rude are far more likely to try things. lol The other thing I like to do is make muffin lunches- make lunch in a muffin tin and challenge myself to fill every hole for each kid. This gets me to offer more items at lunch and often times cause it’s a fun surprise they end up eating the new offending food just cause it’s there and perhaps on a stick, or cut in triangles, or whatever..
Great article, Jenna! So right on when it comes to kids and helping them become Adventurous Eaters. Figuring out what motivates them and involving them is key. You do amazing work – thanks for sharing it! ~Angelle of NourishMD.com
My 5 year old son and I have very similar tastes. When I make something that he thinks he won’t like the taste of I explain 2 things to him. First, I remind him that mommy doesn’t cook stuff that tastes yucky, spicy, etc. because she doesn’t like those things either.
Second, I go throught the list of ingredients. Do you like cheese? yes. Do you like tomatoes? yes. Do you like rice? yes. Do you like red peppers? yes. Those are the ingredients in this dish mommy made so try it and I bet you’ll like it.
Works everytime!
My favorite way to make their food relevant is to tell them about how I ate that particular food as a child. I lived in a city, but spent a month every summer with my grandparents who grew their own food and raised animals. My grandma made the best pickles, plum jam and chicken soup on this earth. There are so many funny stories about me hanging around “helping”, mishaps with churning our butter, eating some boiled potatoes which were supposed to be for the pigs, picking the tomatoes too early because I could not wait, mixing up spinach with sorrel, sweet peppers with hot peppers…
I made some conscious choices when we started our family, based on the values about food that were held by both my family and my husband’s. Both of us come from long lines of ‘scratch cooks,’ so we knew how to make things, which makes a difference right away, because we didn’t have to learn to value fresh and homemade.
The biggies for us have been: 1. Don’t offer processed in the first place (we did, a bit, but it was limited). 2. Encourage the kids to be involved in selection and preparation. 3. Grow some. It’s exciting when you can go out back for a snack, or to dig potatoes or pull carrots for dinner. Even if it’s just cherry tomatoes in a pot on your deck or balcony, beginning that connection to where food comes from is important. 4. Present new foods when they are in season and at their best, because they taste and look better then. 5. Ask questions when the food is rejected, the answers might surprise you. Our son was really picky until I asked him what it was that was preventing him from enjoying certain meals, and it turned out he just didn’t like sauces in the beginning. I’d never cook a separate meal for the picky kid, or serve only that which one person liked best, but I would remove some of the food from a stir-fry before adding the sauce.
I am always trolling for new recipes, and have admitted when I am not fond of the day’s experiments. We vote on new dishes as a family when the meal is done, whether they are keepers or one-timers, and that helps build a bank of favorites.
[...] Eat to Learn program goes along with my theory that if you make real food relevant to kids, they’ll learn to eat and appreciate [...]
Love this! If we want kids to eat real food, we need to tell them why its good for their body. All kids want to grow – so tell them what will help make them big and strong!
What does that mean, fat will help them have good mood control? Can you elaborate?
Thanks