Mum Diary: My Child Just Won't Eat Fruit And Veg

My two-year-old child won’t eat vegetables. There, I have publicly declared my darkest parenting shame.

It’s not that we don’t serve vegetables to Olly; every single mealtime I carefully spoon peas and carrots, or salad, or a medley of seasonal veg onto his plate, and every single mealtime he wrinkles his tiny nose and starts declaring: “No! No peas! No ‘arrots!” and throws a wobbler until we remove them from his plate.

I can just about smuggle veg into him if I blend it, disguise it with an entire jar of pesto and throw in some garlic bread on the side as a sweetener, but that’s it. Foods Olly willingly and cheerfully consumes are almost entirely orange: beans, potato waffles, fish fingers, breaded chicken pieces, that kind of thing.

My eldest Harry eats everything, including mountains of fruit and every vegetable on his plate, so it is really very distressing to see our youngest on hunger strike because I dared serve him a small piece of broccoli.

So what’s the answer?

What Went Wrong?
We’ve always been determined to have a really healthy relationship with food as a family. All meals are eaten at the table, we eat together, we weaned the boys on home-made veggie purees, we model healthy eating ourselves, and we offer fruit and veg at every meal.

The boys cook with me and they help pick the fresh produce at the supermarket, so why will my toddler refuse to touch veg once it’s on his plate and what is the answer?

One thing is certain - we can’t face starving him into vegetable submission for two reasons. The first is that he is very small already; he’s on a very low weight centile. We worry about his weight so we want to see him eat a reasonable portion - and he is incredibly determined not to eat anything he doesn’t fancy, namely anything that doesn’t fall into the fish finger/pasta/potato waffle/weetabix food group.

Now I know, I know that I had to serve him those foods in order for him to decide they were the only things he wanted to eat in the whole world. But when I was worried about his weight gain, I was so happy to see him eat anything at all that I perhaps didn’t realise that he was pushing the veg aside until it was too late.

The second issue is that if he doesn’t eat his supper then we know he will wake up at 4am ready for a Weetabix. That adds another element of desperation to the evening meal when he is pushing away his peas but asking for another serving of potato waffles.

So what can we do?

Seriously, What Can We Do?
The good news is that a new report recently came out, fresh from the academics at Aston and Loughborough Universities, suggesting that it’s all down to the ‘3 Rs’ – repetition, role modelling and rewards.

Well, we have two of those covered already, we have eaten forests of broccoli next to that child, we have enthusiastically munched our way through fields of salad leaves and oceans of peas, all while making appreciative “mmm mmmmm!” noises. Role modelling and repetition we have down.

So, the next tip from the report is rewards. I’ve ordered a sticker chart where Olly gets to stick a cartoon vegetable onto the page himself whenever he eats one – frankly if this doesn’t work then I have to resign myself to the idea that Olly will one day eat fish fingers with beans at his wedding.

I also asked Katie Elfer, herself a mother of two boys and the founder of the kids cookery school Cookery Doodle Doo, for her advice. She agrees that rewards work: “Stickers can work like magic as incentives to try new foods. You could also try making a rainbow chart and encourage the kids to tick off each of the colourful veg they have eaten that day – make a game of getting a ‘full set’!” And a child’s portion is smaller than we might think, she adds, toddlers don’t need much healthy food to fill them up.

She also reassures me that his orange food phase probably won’t last forever: “Fussy eating is probably just a phase - children’s sense of taste changes as they grow; we actually lose around two-thirds of the taste buds that we are born with. As well as intensity of flavour, infants are also cleverly evolved to avoid eating naturally bitter foods like some green vegetables. In ‘the wild’ bitter flavours denote poisonous plants: in fact, modern cleaning products are deliberately made to taste bitter to prevent swallowing. It’s no wonder children can struggle to eat certain vegetables!”

Finally, Katie thinks it’s essential to make mealtimes more playful, saying: “Moderation, variety and having fun are what turn fussy eaters into future foodies.”

So that’s our next move. We’ve done repetition, we’ve done role-modelling – it’s time to go overboard on rewards. We will celebrate every tiny victory and plaster Olly with stickers of dancing carrots and joyful peas. I am going to wean my son from his orange-coloured diet so that, even if he’s not gobbling kale and broccoli, he will eat least eat peas and the odd bit of fruit.

Have you had to deal with a fussy eater? What are your tips for getting children to eat veg? Share your helpful tips with me and the other readers using the comments below.

For lots more advice on toddler foods and tasty, healthy recipes for all the family visit Organix's website where you can also download a free copy of 'The Organix Little Book of Good Food - Toddlers & Families'.

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