I have such Mom Rage over these articles it's unreal. (Is Mom Rage a thing? Let's make it a thing.) The entire idea is that no parent can EVER convince their darling offspring to touch that nasty plate of green food and parents need tips and tricks to sneak in healthy food.
With four kids and nearly eleven years of parenting under my belt I feel like a bit of an expert in this arena. Here's how you get kids to eat their veggies... are you ready? ...
Put Vegetables On Their Plate
BOOM!
Bet you never thought of letting sweet potatoes replace potato chips on your plate more than once a week! Ha! Mind. Blown.
"But, Liana!" some parenting magazine devotee will cry. "My adorable son is two and he *hates* peas. He throws them on the floor every night!"
Listen, Buckaroo, the kid is two. Everything winds up on the floor. Besides, there's more to life than peas. There are whole sections of the grocery store devoted to fresh fruits and vegetables, usually on the far end of the store from the alcohol, but that's a parenting lesson for another day.
Seriously, give your kids vegetables every day and they start eating them. Try them as stir-fry, fritters, raw, steamed, roasted... you don't need to puree them and hide them in popsicles as you try to pretend it's candy. The end result of hiding vegetables in sugar is that the kid thinks eating sugar is a great idea. It's not. Eating raw strawberries, spinach, and mango is a good idea.
So, remember, before RTing that link to yet another recipe for "Hidden Spinach Brownies!" (Wanna take bets it's the writer's recipe for Magic Brownies from college? One leaf looks pretty much like the other.) ask yourself if you really want to see my fist go through the computer screen in an attempt to throttle someone. Nobody wants that. It's so hard for me to write with a broken computer screen.
