Parenting can be a real challenge, particularly when it comes to encouraging youngsters to enjoy a diverse diet.
Kids can be picky eaters, often rejecting fruits and vegetables. However, a TikTok doctor has offered a straightforward tip that might improve their eating habits.
On the @drsmandm TikTok account, Dr Mel acknowledged the difficulty of ensuring children consume a variety of foods nowadays. She pointed out the relentless marketing for ultra-processed food products makes it tough, and noted that some items are engineered to be highly “addictive” – making the path to healthy eating a difficult one.
“Once they’ve got a taste for them, they don’t really want all of the other healthy foods that you’re trying to offer them,” she remarked. She recently attended a course where strategies to tackle this issue were discussed, and one particular tip stood out.
She shared: “One suggestion was to get your children to explore food a bit more because, sometimes, the reason they don’t want to eat it is because it’s something new and unusual to them.
“So I tried this. I really want my son to eat peppers, so I gave him some peppers, and said ‘you don’t have to eat them – you can do whatever you want. Here’s a chopping board, here’s a chopped knife, have a play’.”
Her son thoroughly “loved it”, spending over an hour playing with the peppers. After cutting them into small pieces, he even asked to have them cooked so he could taste them.
Now, she shared that he thinks about peppers “positively”. He might not rush to devour a heap but, if you serve them on his plate, he will eat what he wants. She counts this as a significant “win”, considering her son isn’t the keenest on embracing new foods.
The clip has garnered hundreds of likes since it appeared online, with several people even exchanging their own clever hacks for encouraging youngsters to consume a wider variety of food. It appears that all mums and dads employ varied strategies.
One viewer wrote: “Hidden veg! Finely chopped into pasta sauces etc. Also getting them to help prepare the meal worked with mine too.”