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I am really strict with breakfast. DD gets 10 ounces of blended fruit, only way she consume fruit, 1/3 cup organic vanilla yogurt with vitamin and 2 organic scrambled eggs.

Then she has some O's or granola on the way to school. In the summer she could eat serious amounts of chips on the beach and she will eat 3 pieces of pizza for dinner, or fries when we eat out. But the breakfast holds her against things I cannot get into her the rest of the day.

And we had a check up 2 days ago. 15% of weight and height for her age.

Ren

Texas Summer, that's great that you ran a garden club, did you tie it in with 4-H or Clover Buds? Did you use outside resources like the Extension Offices, or from this great site, www.kidsgardening.com ?

I thought I'd give a few suggestions on veggies and other healthy foods. My 4 teens are good eaters, but don't think it just happenened! There are plenty of "tricks" I've learned along the way.

How to get them to eat fruits and veggies
1) Have them pick out the fruit trees, bring it home in the car, contribute to digging the holes, fertilizing, watering, spraying (as needed), winterizing, and pruning.
2) With veggies, have them pick out the veggies (pick some fun veggies -like pumpkin/popcorn), weed and till the garden, help with fertilizing, help with planting, weeding, and watering.
3) Ask them to check how things are going and pick anything ready.
4) Teach them how to make recipes with fruit/veggies - jam, cobbler, pizza or spaghetti sauce, broccolli salad, etc.

They will eat almost anything they have worked to grow. It's like magic...really!


If you can't garden for whatever reason (I DO understand this), this also works...it's the magic shortcut.
* Kids decide whether or not they like something the first couple of times they eat it, so...
1) Add butter, salt, cheese, or even a sauce over the veggies, even if there is more butter/cheese than veggies at first.
2) Slowly, lessen the amount of cheese and dressing each time it is served.
3) If asked where the cheese or sauce is, tell them you ran out, but thought they could just eat it with a little salt this time.
4) Serve trays of veggies after school with salad dressing on a hot day
5) Be a good example and carry veggies/fruit with you and offer them some (Grapes and bananas, apple slices, carrots, etc) always works when they are hungry and away from home. Eventually, bring them their own bag of fruits/veggies and comment on how you noticed how much they like Jonathan apples, etc.


Never allowed to eat items:
1) French fries and chips
2) Soda, Kool-Aid, Sunny D, Caprisun, etc.
3) Juice is for special breaksfasts and served in a juice cup
4) Candy is eaten sparingly (But I bake for them several times a week)
5) Fast food - We limit this to Costco and Subway. But very rarely do we eat out.
6) Sparingly on the sausage and bacon.
7) No on donuts, churros, other fried food.

Now that they are teens, I don't need to monitor them as much. Fast food makes two of them gag, with one throwing it up.

If you can introduce it while they are young, and not fuss over it, and not make them something just for their liking....they'll follow your lead, along with a little trick or two.

PS: A great Christmas gift for both the giver (your child) and the receiver is homemade jelly (with your child's name on it), homemade salsa, or a bag of homegrown popcorn! (Corn grows so easily, too!)


It also helps them see others enjoy what they've made from fruits/veggies, furthering a positive relationship/association with fruits/veggies.

Hi Jayne,

I agree that these are great ideas and I suspect they will work for many kids. I guess we can even say they worked for mine, who is finally eating a balanced diet at 13 years. We have grown foods at home and visited farms. He shops with me and helps me cook. We look through recipe books and plan menus. He gets excited about what we buy, what we grow and what we are cooking, but when he tries to eat it, he gags. He says he can hardly wait until he is old enough to be able to enjoy all the foods that we grow and buy.

He has sensory overexcitibilies. Here is one aspect of these.



My DS is just so sensitive to subtle differences in flavor and texture that hiding a food in another food was impossible. At a potluck I grabbed some bread that had butter and a sprig of parsley on it. I took off the parsley before I gave it to him; he had not seen the parsley. He took a big bite of the bread and gagged. He said, "Yuck this has parsley in it." He was 4 years old. We have worked on this gradually, for years, trying to desensitize him and finally he is able to try new foods without throwing them up.

Every kid is different and while these techniques are good ideas. For kids with overexcitibilities the effects may take a really long time to show up. I remember getting so discouraged reading the magazines and books that had all these great ideas and recipes for kids that I knew wouldn't work. I felt like I must be doing something wrong. But I was doing OK. DS was moving in the right direction, just very very slowly!

Hi ACS,
My kids have sensory issues, and I was originally very frustrated with their lack of diversity in their diets as toddlers. But I gathered together many suggestions and these are the ones that worked. Gardening especially has introduced them to a wide variety of veggies. If they work hard enough to get something to grow, I think they're willing to give it a try no matter what, even asparagus and celery which they all had problems with the texture at first.

Another issue is that babies are born with their mouths covered with taste buds. When wine tasting, the reason the tasters whoosh the wine in their mouths is to use the taste buds not on the tongue. This causes foods to be very powerful for babies and toddlers and is why baby food is so bland. If my kids gagged, I'd wait and introduce it later. The taste might not be so strong.

You are so right that it is amazing how sensitive they are at the subtle differences.

I do agree, it takes a long time to ease up on the butter or sauce, but eventually it took.

It also was convenient, since labels like Green Giant, have some veggies with sauces/butter already on them, so I could just microwave it and it would work.

I've heard about hiding veggies in food, but I've never tried that. But I have surprised them with zucchini bread and sweet potato pie...couldn't believe there were veggies really in there.

DS has textural and flavor issues with sauces (and butter doesn't cover over the flavor) so the sauce trick never worked for us. He is a purist and really prefers just one food at a time. And he can taste the zucchini in the bread. I once tried zucchini brownies. A friend swore by this recipe because her kids could never taste the zucchini in it. One bite from DS and he yelled, "Are you trying to poison me? What did you put in here?" It actually took a while to undo the damage of that because from then on he didn't trust me when I gave him a new food. I have been up front with ingredients since then, so if he tries a new food it is something he knows about.

We really did do the gardening pretty seriously. And he fully participated and was excited. But he would still gag and be disappointed because he had wanted to like it. Then he would ask excitedly if we liked it. It was very sweet. And i think we are seeing the payoff now, years later. We kept telling him that tastes change and just because he didn't like it now didn't mean he wouldn't like it later and to keep trying it.

The only thing we tried that worked was freezing the foods. He could eat peas and corn if they were frozen and he ate the whole. Once they thawed though, it was over. I think the cold blocked the taste.

I guess my point is that there are lots of useful tricks, but no magic bullet. I know I got a lot of harsh looks and strong judgments from other parents who didn't have this problem. I don't want other people to feel bad. If you child has taste overexcitibility, you may just have to do what you can and then wait it out.

My mom used to feed us frozen veggies straight from the freezer as a snack food.

Cathy, I do the same thing with my DS. We started with frozen peas and green beans when he was three or four. I think he still prefers peas that way. They taste great on a hot summer day. What other veggies did she try frozen?

I also have a friend that pours yogurt (organic) into popsicle molds for the freezer. Her kids think that they are getting away with eating ice cream for breakfast. While that is a great way to get them to eat dairy for breakfast, I'm not sure what habits that teaches them in the long run, though???? I'm picturing a 20-something-year-old kid eating a bowl of ice cream for breakfast and saying, "But my mom let me eat ice cream for breakfast all the time growing up!" Sometimes the cleverest ideas that we have as parents look positively insane years down the road!

She mostly gave us frozen peas and corn. You can make "popsicles" out of all kinds of things. You can peel a banana, put a stick in it and freeze it.

You can add fiber to yogurt by topping it with bran buds or similar cereal.