Vegetables child refusal

[Rizzoli123]

My oldest son is 6. Everytime I put vegetables on a plate he sees them, has a tantrum and refuses to eat them. If he comes to eat the dinner eats every thing but them. Have tried treats and rewards. Says they taste yucky. Me and daddy say you have to try them. The school teacher said he is one of the better eaters in class but for some reason be won't eat them at home.

ANY tips to get him to at least try them!

Have you tried corn on the cob, raw peas in the pod that he pops open ?
Make it interesting, not just on the plate.
Sainsbury’s do a hidden veg pasta sauce.

But I think she said don't push it and allow them to choose.

I think you need to take the pressure off. Don't ask him to eat them, just get him to have a pea on the plate without kicking off. Once you've got to the stage where he won't even have it on the plate, you need to take a step right back away from any pressure and drama.

@chunderwunder

What about sauces? I make a pasta sauce with tinned tomatoes that also has onion, carrot, celery, pepper, courgette, aubergine etc. in it. Chopped really small or even pureed.

Or pizza. Gets loads of veg on that. Or quiche. Or caramelised onion tart.

My kid won't eat any veg apart from sweetcorn if it's plonked on his plate. He eats loads of veg without realising because it's in sauces and stuff.

Also remember baked beans count as veg. Winner.

Do to do veg on pizza he just picks it off. Won't eat quiche or any pastry really. Tried in sauce and he could taste the veg so he wouldn't eat it

Maybe try raw. My sister only ‘realised’ that she liked veggies when she left home and discovered that toy could eat them raw! Soup and veggie juices maybe?

Also you cloud slaver an old shoe in cheese sauce or wrap it in pastry and I’d eat it.

@InconvenientPeg

I think you need to take the pressure off. Don't ask him to eat them, just get him to have a pea on the plate without kicking off. Once you've got to the stage where he won't even have it on the plate, you need to take a step right back away from any pressure and drama.

I've tried it. I have put a carrot and a pea on his plate tonight and he eat everything else apart from that

@DinosaurDiana

Have you tried corn on the cob, raw peas in the pod that he pops open ? Make it interesting, not just on the plate. Sainsbury’s do a hidden veg pasta sauce.

Won't eat sweetcorn. Haven't had any peas in the pod before. I have thought about growing his own but I still don't think he would eat them

You are in a battle and he is winning. This may well be about control.
I’d think about giving up for now, take the pressure off you both.

@Lorw

If getting veggies into him is important to you couldn’t you mash them in with mash etc? I agree maybe making them a bit sweeter, honey carrots etc

My SS won’t eat vegetables unless they are basically mush 😂 like way over cooked carrots 😂 how are you cooking them OP?

He will only eat meat. So if i give him a Sunday dinner he just eats the meat. Tried to mask them with potato but he notices and takes the out. Tried swede mash the other day he moaned as it was yellow and wouldn't eat it.

But that's fine.

Then just every night, just mini amounts. No pressure to eat, just on the plate. The likelihood is, given that he eats them at school, that at some point, when he forgets that it was a drama, he'll just start eating them. You just need to hold your nerve.

If he eats them at school, then there's something at home that's making him behave differently. So you need to try to take any drama away.

It's hard, but breathe deep and ignore!

I've got three. One eats everything, another has an ok range and another will only eat potatoes and cauliflower soup.

Your child might not actually like them. Their taste buds change with age. I remember hating sprouts and cauliflower but as an adult I like them.

Meal times is the only time the kids have autonomy over what they eat. I never force them to eat anything or punish them if they dont eat anything.

Honestly if I was you, I would blend veg in to spag bal sauce, ect make soups that they can't see the veg in. My famous cauliflower and cheddar soup was 'white and cheese soup' for years before I admitted what was in it.

Same with my tomato soup, had loads over veg in - they just didn't know!

Push raw veggies and dont make meal times a battle.

Have you tried going to a pick your own farm??? My child (admittedly younger and less savvy than yours!) never liked carrots, but had a whale of a time pulling them out of the ground and helping me wash them and now eats them happily. We go quite often and pick all different things and the experience seems to help. Even more unusual stuff like marrow and broad beans he’ll try, because he picked them. Good luck!

@InconvenientPeg

But that's fine.

Then just every night, just mini amounts. No pressure to eat, just on the plate. The likelihood is, given that he eats them at school, that at some point, when he forgets that it was a drama, he'll just start eating them. You just need to hold your nerve.

If he eats them at school, then there's something at home that's making him behave differently. So you need to try to take any drama away.

It's hard, but breathe deep and ignore!

I second this. The school had sent out a school xmas dinner pic and I could see dd sat with a carrot on a fork half in her mouth! She said they were baby carrots so I that's all I buy now (chanteney carrots )

That's a horrible thing to say

I ended up just telling myself (through admittedly clenched teeth) that there are plenty of people all over the globe doing quite well without broccoli or whatever.

Definitely stealth veg in everything & salad/veg on the table, but I found it most effective just to get very, very, bored with the whole subject. One of them would scoff carrots by the kilo, another ate cherry tomatoes, the third would eat frozen peas under sufferance. All of them were staunch refusers of most veg.

So the veg has always been both on the table, & as they got older, freely available in the fridge for snacking.

I finally knew I'd won when we went away for a fortnight recently & ate out every night. My 3 are now teenagers.

We came back, I made a vegetable curry & they descended on it like gannets. Apparently I should always cook food like that (have been, for 17 years, thanks).

The one mistake I made was too much beige, processed food when they were little. I should've been less of a pushover there, & held my ground a bit, tbh.

Is he actually eating the vegetables at school? I got told DS was clearing his plate each day which technically he was however what he was really doing was sneaking someone to his friends' plates and 'accidentally' dropping the rest onto the floor.

Is there a time of day when he is very very hungry. Such as after a long walk or after something physically active. Or perhaps the next meal when you know he didn't eat much prior to that. Offer him vegetables then and come up with a spurious reason why you don't have the usual snacks, he might be hungry enough to try them. This worked with my picky eaters and I often offered things like broccoli as a "starter" before the rest of the meal and eventually they just grew to like them. I'm not suggesting you make him go hungry more that you take opportunities when his appetite is greatest.

Hide all veg until they’re older. Much less stressful.
Cook onions, peppers and carrots with tinned tomatoes and use it to make pizza - call it pizza sauce. Don’t try this with veg that can be bitter (anything green).
Same sauce with pasta and cheese with or without meatballs or turning it into bolognese.
After a while, you can try adding courgettes or mushrooms. Call it something different I case they don’t like it at first - e.g lasagne sauce.
Cauliflower blends into cheese sauce and remains hidden.
Beetroot brownies are great. Steam then blend the beetroot (ignore whatever the recipe says to do with it!) Ditto carrot/courgette cake - grate the veg really small (I haven’t tried blending; I imagine it might work with the courgettes) and don’t let them help with the baking!
And there’s always pink milk (blend with strawberries/raspberries - do they eat fruit?)

Or my kids would try anything if there was a piece of meringue on offer for pudding. (Yay for pure sugar!) Bribery works. And as time goes on, the veg portions get bigger and the bribe gets smaller.

Snack Plates were our turning point for fussy eaters (the plates with separate compartments). There's a company called Pick Plates, or a Home Bargains etc usually do them.
I'd put all my DC's meals and snacks in one of those, never mentioning the veg that they ignored for months, but gradually reducing the amount of other things so they were hungry and more tempted to try the veg. The most important thing was not mentioning it - no bribery, no arguments, nothing. Just completely ignore it.
"Helping" me with food prep helped too. I'd ask my DC to help me chop/grate/spiralise veg for my dinner. Again no mention of them having to eat it. My DS who "hated" cucumber once helped me spiralise some. I took some out to try and said "oo yum", then he copied me and ate the whole lot!
Admittedly mine didn't get out of their fussy phases until about the age of 10, but that's because I'd spent years before trying too hard which only made it worse.

@Rizzoli123 My child is the same except she will eat raw carrots, baby cucumbers and sometimes lettuce. Before she was willing to eat those I was worried that she wasn’t getting adequate nutrition because she meticulously picked out even the smallest bit of vegetable from her food.

So, I added a small amount of finely chopped (with a food processor) carrot into her banana smoothie that I made with frozen banana and milk. She didn’t seem to notice and happily drank her smoothie. Then one day she walked into the kitchen and saw me add the carrot and refused to drink the banana smoothie. Even though I had told her that she has had it before and liked it she still refused. I had to make banana smoothie in front of her and show her that I wasn’t adding anything else for her to drink it again.

Try ways to hide vegetables without him seeing. I also make a vegetable soup and then cook noodles in it. Dd will eat the noodles and I hope they have absorbed some of the nutrients. FWIW despite being fussy, she seems to be growing healthy and strong so I try not to be overly worried.

Lessen snacks so he’s hungry at meal times and keen to eat

Serve salad items as a starter in the middle of the table with people helping themselves. Don’t ask him to try or eat, just tell him it’s the starter before the main course. Wait a while before serving the main.

Some good advice here ! I have the same issue with my eldest, here are some thoughts :

• have him help prep, he'll be so proud to have contributed that he'll be excited about eating it.

• make it fun. Use colours, cut vegetables in funny shapes, using cookie cutters for instance. You can use beetroot juice to colour your rice a bright purple-red, which is fun !

• make it tasty. A bit of oil and salt drizzled on helps (sunflower as my son doesn't love olive oil). Spices are your friend (I didn't believe it until I saw son wolf down spicy chorizo and jalapeno crisps !) so a bit of salt and pepper and herbs go a long way.

• make it look like not vegetables. I often puree the brocoli with some cream cheese, it improves the texture immensely. Another idea is cutting up the vegetable in small bits, toss in some mince, add a bit of egg (and flour if necessary to thicken) and fry in pan. You can even shape it using a cookie cutter.

• make it easy to eat. I try to serve it so they can eat with their fingers (but they're very young still)

• no fuss. I serve the meal, they eat it or they don't. My son has been to bed on an empty stomach before because he wouldn't eat the food I served. Doesn't seem to have hurt him (I should clarify he is a healthy weight and was asked to eat many times, and given many opportunities to change his mind).

• make it impossible, or at least difficult, to sort the vegetables from the rest. For instance : pie, omelette with spinach and goat cheese (good luck dissecting that !), soup, etc

If he's filling up on the meat I'd also serve less of that. He doesn't need to eat meat at every meal.

And finally there are some pasta made with vegetables. My kids love them.The fact that they're multicolor probably helps !

I also noticed that sweet vegetables go easier (sweet potatoe, carrots, squash... Basically everything orange. Still struggling with the green).

OP I am 47 and I still don’t like most fruit or veg. I have real textural issues with both.

The truth is that sometimes you just can’t push it so you need to look at other methods:

For my part I like raw veg better than cooked. Carrots, peas in the pod, I will eat carrots cooked but they have to still be crunchy.

I like baby sweet corn because this is also quite crunchy, I can’t stand anything that is soft .

From a fruit perspective I will eat apples, but other than that I drink fruit juice although it has to be smooth.

Soups are also your friend here. You can pretty much put anything into a soup, and then blend it. In the case of e.g. tomato soup, I blend it and then pass it through a sieve to remove the seeds and skin.

Fagitas also work: but instead of salad etc dice the chicken small, then cook, and then add a couple of small diced onions and peppers. Mix in the fajita sauce and you barely taste the veg.

Ditto with stir-fry. Broccoli, baby ssweetcorn, sugar snap peas, the list is endless.

Can you make your own stocks instead of using cubes. That way you are putting veg into those which will be absorbed even though you’re straining the stock.

If you make e.g. cottage pie or spaghetti bolognese use an onion, carrot and celery as the base. It’s chopped so finely that he won’t know. Then add the tinned tomatoes which contain nutrients of their own.

It’s taken a long time for me to get there, but tbh if you put a plate of veg in front of me I still wouldn’t eat it. So it’s all about being inventive, but as time passes that just becomes a way of life. Iyswim.