How to Get Your Kids to Eat (almost) Anything
First it’s chicken nuggets. Every day. Every meal. For 7.5 weeks. Then it’s mashed potatoes and chocolate milk. This goes on for approximately 2 months. After a while, only cheese will do. And the cheese must be mozzarella and shaped like a stick. No slices. Nothing orange.
Surviving our children’s food preferences is one of the most frustrating and difficult aspects of parenting. And, as a mom of children with multiple food allergies and intolerances, my field of available nutritious meals is more narrow than most people’s.
Still, I’ve learned a few things about what kids like. About how to pull the wool over their eyes or, simply, how to present protein to make it look like irresistible morsels to five-year-old eyes.
Stick a toothpick in it. Preferably a toothpick topped with frills or flags. The Littles will be so blinded by the novelty of a special, pointy eating utensil that they’ll forget to fall to the floor in tears when they see their hot dog slices or chicken breast chunks lovingly laid out on the table.
Wrap it in crescent roll dough. Because who can resist the pull of high fructosy, trans fat laden dough around their meat or cheese?
It’s all about shapes. Buy the same darn fish sticks they claim to hate, in, say, the shape of giant squid or train wheels (and if you know where to find these, please let me know), and they’ll gobble them up, claiming to love the “new” food.
Put one thing on their plate that they love. Sometimes, just to avoid another mealtime meltdown, I’ll place a TicTac on their plate next to the good food. And they are often so dazzled by the shiny, orange candy, that they’ll inhale it and their carrot sticks too.
Individually packaged. Yeah, separate, plastic packets of dried fruit and cookies are terrible for the environment. And Reducing, Reusing and Recycling is an issue I do care deeply about. But when mealtime hits and I’m frantic for food the kids will eat, I usually think, Screw it. I’ll offset my GoGurt footprint by taking a shorter shower tomorrow morning.
Clearly I’m no nutritionist, but these tips have worked for me (at least once, sometimes more) and I hope they’ll give you a moment of five p.m. peace too.
