Vegetable Ice Cream

News flash: Soon your kids won’t have to eat actual vegetables in order to eat their veggies.

Forget sneaking cauliflower into macaroni and cheese, or black beans into brownies.  Those tricks are for amateurs!  Now you can eat vegetable desserts!

I’ve written a lot about vegetables lately because it's a topic parents really care about. Read Why Toddlers Don’t Eat Vegetables and My Toddler Used to Eat Vegetables.

And the pressure is really on even for parents to get veggies into their kids.  Have you seen the Food Plate that replaced the Food Pyramid?  

Half the plate is supposed to be fruits and vegetables.   But don’t worry.  It's America, and here there's always a creative solution just around the corner.

Mixed-Vegetable ice cream! 

What child wouldn't eat this?

Read the New York Times article about this delicacy (or buy it in Brooklyn, NY).

Celery sorbet!

 

Want the recipe?

Most parents I know (I hope?) would never take these desserts seriously because they teach the wrong habits.

And I agree.  Desserts don't teach kids to eat veggies, no matter which miracle ingredients they contain.

But what about Gerber Graduates Vegetable Puffs - Sweet Potato?  Parents feed their toddlers these treats all the time, even though, sweet potato is the 6th ingredient— after 3 kinds of flour, wheat starch, and sugar—and even though Vegetable Puffs teach kids to like salty-crunchy foods, not sweet potatoes.

Or veggie chips?

These foods don't teach kids to love veggies: they teach kids to hate veggies.  

There's compelling evidence that more kids eat foods high in sugar, salt and fat, the less they like fresh, natural foods.  

Read the New York Times article about the addicting affects of eating fatty foods.

Choosing snacks or desserts because they claim to contain veggies isn't the same thing as feeding them actual vegetables.  And now we know it backfires.

If you want your kids to eat veggies at dinner, pay attention to the habits you're fostering throughout the day. It's not what you feed, but what you teach, that matters.

~Changing the conversation from nutrition to habits.~

Raising Lawyers

Living with a toddler is like living with a lawyer.

Everything is a conversation, a compromise, a counter-offer.  What to wear. What to eat. What time to go to bed.  You propose one thing, your child noodles for another.

Did you ever wonder how your kid got that way?  How your once-placid peacock became such a skilled negotiator?

Recent research proposes a shocking answer: the dinnertime dance.

• “You need to eat more…just two bites.”
• “You can have dessert if you eat your broccoli.”
• “I know you don’t like milk but you have to drink some. OK, eat some cheese.”

Yes, our best efforts to instill some healthy eating habits are doing something else instead: they are creating little lawyers.

When parents negotiate with their kids over food they are not just socializing their children about food and eating. They are also teaching their children how to interact with others around food.

“What do you want to eat?” sets the stage for bargaining—particularly if your child asks for Jello when you had something more substantial (such as chicken) in mind.

• “No, you can’t have Jello for dinner. How about chicken?”
• “But I want Jello.”

And so it goes.

Similarly, by using dessert as a reward for eating something else, parents create desserts (and sweets) as a source of conflict, something to be negotiated. 

(Alternatively, giving desserts away for free in the appropriate quantity and frequency or providing fruit for dessert are strategies that eliminate conflict. Read Dishing Up Dessert.)

Of course, Trading Peas for Pie has many pitfalls—primarily that it teaches kids to prefer ice cream and other sweets above anything healthy—but if you’re stuck in a battle with your little babe, think about this:  

Transmitting the idea that dessert is the most desirable destination, and that it comes with strings attached, sets the stage for only one kind of interaction: a bargain over how many bites of broccoli earn a brownie.

Teach kids to bargain and they will.

”She’s had more than me.”

Parents negotiate with their children over many aspects of eating, not just over types and quantities of food.  Sibling fairness, for instance, can be a huge area of contention. 

I know fairness is an important lesson for kids to learn, but let me ask you this: How will your child figure out how many cookies are healthy for her if she can bargain up successfully simply by pointing to her sister?  Never mind that her sister is bigger, more active and didn’t just down a bag of chips…

Negotiating over food muddies the healthy-eating lesson and can leave kids confused.

Put another way: When you mix up messages about sibling equity with eating right you dilute and distort the lesson about food.  You can’t teach kids how many cookies they should eat if you’re also teaching them everyone gets the same amount.

(By the way, teaching kids to match consumption to body needs is a different way of teaching sibling equity: it’s fair that we all get what we need.)

Researchers speculate that negotiating can diminish your parental authority.

After all, if you can be talked out of milk and into cheese, talked into two bites instead of four, or convinced to serve macaroni and cheese yet again, how much weight does your word really carry?

Muddied lessons aside, this is the real stinker! (I don’t know about you, but I need all the clout I can muster.)

The solution, then, is to establish a clear set of boundaries and expectations while remaining empathic and respectful of your children’s opinions.   Want to know how to do that? Read The Goldilocks Approach.

Of course, parents only negotiate because we panic when our kids won’t touch their peas.

But researchers suspect there is something else going on too: there is a tension between parental authority and control and two other widely held American values—child autonomy and individual choice.

So take heart: Each negotiation shores up your child’s skills, self-confidence and assertiveness, and those are important traits for successful lawyers to learn!

~ Changing the conversation from nutrition to habits.~

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Source:

Paugh, A. and C. Izquierdo. 2009. “Why is This a Battle Every Night?: Negotiating Food and Eating in American Dinnertime Interaction.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 19(2): 185-204.

Dishing Up Dessert

Most parents dread dessert because it’s the source of so much mealtime tension, but I don’t.  I celebrate dessert.  In fact, I think dessert is so useful that I dish it up every night … with delight.

No, I’m not a glutton for punishment, and I’m not worried about turning my daughter into a sweets-loving, cake-coveting, ice-cream-adoring Cookie Monster. On the contrary.  I’m pretty sure that serving dessert on a regular basis has turned my daughter into a stellar eater. Read Dessert: How I LOVE Thee

Believe it or not, dessert is one of the most overlooked tools for teaching kids to eat right.  You might even say…a dessert a day keeps the doctor away!

You just have to change what you serve. 

Change what you serve for dessert and revolutionize your kids’ eating habits.

The problem with dessert isn’t dessert, per se. 

I may be going out on a limb here, but I’m going to assume that you are not ideologically opposed to the final course of the meal.  Instead, what you’re worried about is the quantity of crap your kids regularly consume.

But that’s the nutrition perspective. Turn your attention to habits and you can see more of the problem.

I’m not denying that most after-dinner delicacies are sugar-laden landmines, but that’s not what makes dessert so lethal.  Dessert is dangerous because it produces a bad family dynamic — think of it as the Dessert Dance: dessert makes kids gloss over the good stuff to get to the good stuff, and this, in turn, makes parents push the peas, do the two-more bites tango, and otherwise beg, bribe and cajole their kids into eating more of the main meal.

This kind of interaction is stressful and it sets up a struggle. What’s more, it teaches kids to value dessert, not veggies; it teaches kids to eat dessert when they’re already full; it makes them fight you for control over their eating.

The solution is to make dessert delicious, but not the usual confection.  The key is to serve fruit.

Fruit neutralizes dessert. Takes it down a peg or two. Makes mealtimes manageable.

Most parents know they have to restrain the role of dessert, but the tactic they use—limiting how often it is offered—makes matters worse. By banishing dessert (or temporarily exiling it) parents make it even more desirable.

Serving fruit preserves the pleasure of dessert—your kids will still get excited about it—but eliminates the problems. Here's how:

1) Your kids won’t clamor for fruit dessert; kiwi just doesn’t have the same appeal (or sway) as cake. That means your kids won’t be tempted to forgo their real food for it, and they certainly won’t beg, whine and wheedle their way to it.  In turn, you won’t be tempted to use dessert to get a few more bites of broccoli into your beauties. The dessert dance will be over.

2) Fruit dessert will teach your kids the right way to end the average meal—and give them a little European flair.

3) Serving fruit for dessert will mean you can relax knowing your kids can top off a poorly eaten meal with something healthy.  Think of fruit as a built-in back-up.  For more on back-ups read How Cottage Cheese Changed My Life.

4) Fruit dessert will help your children evaluate whether they’re really still hungry; people don’t usually pound down a pear just because it’s there.

Serving fruit won't automatically solve all your mealtime problems (no single strategy is that good), but it will take the most explosive element out of the equation.

And when you do serve sweets and treats your kids will know that sweets really are treats.  Now that's a lesson for a lifetime of healthy eating!

~ Changing the conversation from nutrition to habits.~

P. S. Breakfast is another missed opportunity for teaching kids to eat right.   To learn more about that, read Breakfast: The Most Important Meal of the Day.