| Having somehow given birth to not one but two fussy eaters, I have a few humble insights to contribute. Both are now teenagers, and to our surprise, they are finally starting to move beyond Cheerios and peanut-butter sandwiches, without which they would have expired years ago.
Here’s one possible strategy, based on the assumptions that you don’t really want to fight about food at every meal, and you don’t believe in force-feeding.
1. Forget about the Clean Plate Club. Eating even a mouthful of something new or scary is better than not trying it at all.
2. Make sure they have plenty of the stuff they actually like (assuming it’s not too junky), and stock up on vitamins.
3. Make food look appealing to kids: raisin faces on muffin tops, sandwiches trimmed of the hateful crust and cut into shapes with cookie cutters. Your dog will enjoy all those crusts.
4. Involve kids in cooking, even if they think they’ll never eat the stuff. Learning to make scrambled eggs and being able to control their dryness converted our son from an egg-hater to an egg-eater.
5. If they prefer your best friend Sylvia’s cooking, that’s fine—send them over there. Her kids might like your cooking!
6. Be patient. In retrospect, I worried too much about this when our children were little. None of our schemes and persuasions worked; now that we’ve given up, they are suddenly scarfing down everything in sight.
Except lima beans. |
