Fun With Food
Making food more fun is a great way to encourage fussy eaters to become more flexible.
Cherylyn Feierabend
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Fun With Food
Hey there! You’re listening to the Mighty Mommy with some quick and dirty tips for practical parenting.
Have you ever spent your time fixing a nice dinner for your family? Everyone sits together at the dining table and the wonderful meal you’ve prepared is eaten by all family members? That’s never happened to me either, unless dinner was hot dogs and macaroni and cheese. Sure, my husband and I eat our meals happily, but sometimes I feel as though our kids are the pickiest eaters in the world. As it turns out, according to some of the e-mail I’ve received in the last few weeks, I’m not alone in the way I feel.
One specific listener, Suzi, wrote in expressing that her twin toddlers only like to eat macaroni or yogurt. She’s singing my song right there. My kids are the same way. Not only that, but my four-year-old is very hesitant to try anything new and if my two-year-old son sees his big sister turning her nose up at something, he’s quick to repeat the behavior. I certainly can’t force my children to eat and wouldn’t want to do that anyway. Gentle encouragement is given, but if they choose not to eat the food presented to them, they don’t eat. I let them know that this is their meal and if they don’t eat it, there won’t be any further food offered until the next meal. It’s important to be consistent and I stick to my guns … most of the time.
Children will eat when they are hungry and it’s important that they do; however, you want them to eat a nutritious variety of foods. Making food more fun is a great way to encourage fussy eaters to become more flexible. Many children are more inclined to eat something new if they’ve helped you prepare it. My daughter used to love chicken in any form and now I’m lucky if she’ll even eat a chicken nugget. I let her help me crush the ingredients for breading chicken one night and we talked until dinnertime about how she helped me cook the chicken. When it was time to eat, she was still hesitant, but she wanted to taste what she had made. Once she tried it, she loved it. If you can get your child interested in the food they are refusing to eat, they may try it. It’s a lot harder to dislike something that actually tastes good. Convincing your kids to take that first bite is half the battle.
Another way I’ve found to make food fun is to make it aesthetically pleasing to children. For example, when I make sandwiches, I let my kids pick out a favorite cookie cutter and we cut the bread into fun shapes before we put on the topping. The leftover bread goes into a bag to save for the ducks at the park or to make breadcrumbs. My kids also love mouse-shaped pancakes. It’s easy enough to make one round center pancake then add two smaller round cakes for ears. Then we decorate the mouse-faces with various fruits. Blueberries can be eyes and slices of strawberries can make a big red mouth. What the kids don’t know is that while I’m mixing the pancake batter, I throw in some oatmeal and shredded apples. The kids gobble them down, but almost always with the request for “more syrup, please mommy!” This always makes me cringe. The little bit of syrup I do give them should be enough, but because it soaks into the pancakes where the kids can’t see it, they think it’s gone. I have discovered the solution! Food coloring is saving me from endlessly repeating, “You have enough syrup already.” I put the syrup in a cup, stir in some food coloring and pour the colored syrup on the cakes. Now, my kids just enjoy their pancakes and it’s more fun for everyone. You can even put food coloring into the batter. Make blue pancakes with purple syrup or pink pancakes with green syrup.
Of course, your kids’ favorite food may still be mac n’ cheese, but that doesn’t have to be a problem. The key here is to make something they already love into something more nutritious than it already is. If your children aren’t eating enough proteins, fruits, or vegetables, you may want to consider sneaking these items into the foods your kids already love. Jessica Seinfeld wrote an entire cookbook of recipes designed to help your kids eat healthy. It’s called Deceptively Delicious and was recommended by a fellow mommy-blogger, The Wicked Stepmom,who is having great success with the recipes. You can read her post about her successes with the cookbook on her blog. I’ll include a link in the transcript.
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Family Dinner image courtesy of Shutterstock