Some kids give us a hard time when eating fruit, so I think that we need to be creative. For example, my older kid didn't like to eat oranges until the time I started to slice them with 8, now he loves to eat them like that! Any more tips?
Slicing fruit is a great way to get kids to eat, since the portions seem smaller and cutting releases more juices and sugars, making it more flavorful. A good tip would be making a fruit salad. However as cutting fruit makes them much more prone to spoilage they should be freshly prepared and promptly consumed.
I am lucky because here in Ireland kids are only allowed fruit or yogurt as an extra in school. Which I find has given mine more of a love for fruit. Saying that all kids still like chocolate. However its easy to get mine to eat fruit now though.
The easiest way is to cut sugar out.. then anything sweet will taste fantastic to them. White sugar and it's substitutes are unnaturally sweet.. so of course actual foods will never compare. If they're used to highly sweet things, I think slowly cutting it out and substituting with fruit is the best way to go. Have tons of it accessible so they have the choice and make sure you're eating it too.
I am always a little bit shocked when I hear that there are kids who do not eat or like fruit, even though I do know that they exist. The children in my household - all three of them - love their fruit. In fact, they come home from school and often have a bowl full of assorted fruit ready for them to eat. I agree with the above post though, as far as getting children to eat more fruit. Brilliant idea.
I totally agree with this. My kids LOVE fruit. Any kind of fruit. And I'm sure it has to do with the fact that we aren't huge sugar eaters. I mean, they get treats, but not often enough that nothing else tastes good to them. Along these lines, I think another way to get kids to eat more fruit is to cut fruit JUICE. It is about 10X sweeter and probably 10X more unhealthy. I have 4 kids. 2 have been easy, 2 are picky eaters. But all in all, I've never been a mom who has to jump through hoops to get my kids to eat something. More often than not, it is a matter of boundary enforcing in all areas, and setting myself up for success. Obviously, if there is a food they do not like, I give it to them first, when they are most hungry - then they eat it to get to the good food. No special shapes, no magical ways of hiding food. Just line it up in order of gross to good.
Sometimes presentation counts. The way I make my kids eat their apples is by coring it first then slicing it thinly to produce donut shaped apples. Then I place them in a bowl of cold water. They absolutely love it. When fruits are plentiful in the household, I use the good old juicer.
The children in my household are big sugar eaters, I would day. Yeah, they definitely are, and they still cannot get enough fruit. But I do think that if you have children who will not eat fruit but they eat all of the sweets that they can stomach, then taking away the sweets and offering them a fruit alternative, is an absolutely brilliant idea.
What we usually do with the kids in our family is we would make the fruit into juice and add a bit of sugar. It makes it more fun and I know the kids will probably like it because we also used to drink it when we were kids. The only pRoblem is that sometimes they are really not in the mood of they don't like a particular fruit and no amount of juicing will make them like it.
No, I don't think it's a matter of 'making them' eat fruits. I think that it's a matter of creativity. If you can make the fruit have tastes they don't experience often, or you mix them with flavors they like, or even if you don't add anything and instead make it look attractive to them, they'll take it. At least that's how I did with my brothers.
One of our favorite ways to enjoy fruit as a treat is to freeze bananas, then throw them in the blender. They become nice and smooth, just like ice cream. You could add peanut butter or cocoa powder in the blender, or just eat them blended. Awesome, and like I said, the kiddos don't know it isn't ice cream! Great dessert and totally healthy.
Most parents forget that their kids learn much from observing them. If the parents at least pretend to enjoy eating fruits from the time the kids are very young, they too will believe that eating fruits is "cool" and you won't have trouble getting them to eat them. Set the right example and everything else will go along swimmingly.
I think small portions and not forcing them to eat it helps. My parents forced me to eat fruit to the point I would cry. I now do not eat fruit at all because of this; I am exercising my right as an adult to choose not to and there are bad memories of being forced and punished if I didn't eat fruit.
I was never keen on fruit as a child either. I always found it unmanageable - either there were too many pips, it would need peeling or it wasn't quite ripe. So I think that pre-preparing fruit and making it easier to eat would be a great idea. @Theo, your comment "I am exercising my right as an adult to choose not to.." really made me smile, thanks!
It depends what they don't like, but fruit salads and fruit smoothies are big winners with most kids. You could also go ahead and chop or slice fruits and put it in their breakfast -- I loved slice bananas in my cereals and cubes of apples in my oatmeal, for example. I think it's much more beneficial to just make them enjoy it than to make them eat it. Also, veggies are more healthy than fruits, what with fruits being so full of sugar, so if they don't particularly enjoy fruits, as long as they get their vitamins and nutrients from some fresh products, it should not be such a big deal.
I really never had any issues with my little ones eating fruit. It is usually when we have their cousins over for the weekend that I have little ones in the house who will rather starve then eat fruit. But I recently got some games in the house and one of them is Jinga. You know where I 'm going with this. I sat out some grapes, sliced oranges, and sliced apples. Then I told them the rules. For each time you take one and none fall, you eat a grape.For each one that you take and the pieces shake, you eat a slice of apple.Lastly for each one you take and call Jinga , you get to eat a slice of orange and make a face with it.They love making faces with oranges in their teeth! 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
Haha, so that is a clever way to deal with kids, with games, I do that as well and they face things way better in a good playing mood instead of an imposition one. We just need to be smart to take them where we want.
Don't serve them anything, but only fruits! Don't pity them that they are not eating because they don't like what's being served. They will eventually not be able to live and stand their hunger. If they can't do anything else, they will eventually eat those fruits.
I think this is a fabulous reply. I have found that if I want my son (a Senior in high school) to do a certain thing, most of the time all I have to do is do that thing myself, and he is soon to follow suit. I learned this when he was about 7 years old. I was having some problems with my left leg, so at night I would have to put a "prop" (pillows) under it to alleviate pain. One late night I went into my son's room to check on him, and saw that he had pillows propped underneath his leg. I had been totally oblivious to the fact that he was paying attention to my doing this. These days he's still the same way. If I want him to eat more fruit, of course I tell him to, and he's like "Okay mom." But if I put lots of fruit in in the refrigerator and casually, nonchalantly eat it myself, in a few days I'll see him grabbing fruit and eating it, without any prompting from me.
I totally agree with you here, I think it is bad (very bad) business to force a child to eat something when there are so many food options out there. There's more than one way to get the particular nutrients that are needed. I don't believe in making a child eat anything, just do your job as a parent and put in the extra effort to find out what the child likes. Children are people too, after all. I kind of feel about steak, and certain vegetables, the same way you feel about fruit. When I was a child, and my mom cooked steak, the texture would be too much for me to swallow, so anytime I saw that there was steak for dinner, I felt some anxiety. Years later, as a grown woman, I've probably had 5 steaks in the past 20 years, which means that my son, who is a Senior in high school (and as a 'growing boy' would probably love steak), has probably had less than 5 steaks in his life so far.
