Should you hide vegetables in your kid's food?
One of the most popular child feeding “hacks” is sneaking vegetables into a more kid-friendly food so that the child will unwittingly them. From baked goods to meatballs to smoothies, there are endless recipes out there that will supposedly turn your kid into a well-nourished veggie eater who thinks they are just eating muffins and mac and cheese.
I think we can all acknowledge that vegetables are one of the most universal sources of parental feeding angst. While they are well-established as a nutritious food and can add a lot to meals and snacks (color! crunch! flavor!), kids just don’t really like them, especially the green ones. However, this rejection of vegetables can be easier to manage when we recognize that this is just a normal kid thing - they are absolutely not doing it to annoy us. Here is a quick summary of what is going on:
In general, kids will voluntarily eat 1) what they like and 2) what is familiar to them. “Liking” is the major factor for young babies, who will instinctively reject anything that tastes bitter, an innate way of protecting themselves from ingesting toxins. Many vegetables taste bitter and babies spit them out, and parents might stop offering them in favor of something that the baby seems to enjoy more. Then the baby becomes a toddler and hits the neophobic (“fear of new things”) stage, where he refuses to engage with anything that is not familiar, including foods that he has not been eating regularly. The neophobic phase can last for a long time, and once kids are mostly past it (at around 6 years old), their food preferences and eating habits are well-established and often don’t include vegetables. This is a pretty standard course of events even when you know what you are “supposed” to do to turn your children into veggie lovers. Admittedly, this is something that I have studied and thought about for years and my kids eat very few vegetables.
So if you are someone who would like your children to eat vegetables for whatever reason - they are chronically constipated and you think the fiber would help, other people in your family like eating vegetables and whoever prepares meals would rather not make multiple different options, you want to make sure they are getting enough nutrients, whatever - you might be tempted to make some zucchini brownies or spinach meatballs and “trick” your child into consuming the hidden veggies. This might work for awhile. But let’s consider how this is impacting your child’s long-term relationship to vegetables and to food in general.
Intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation to eat: While there are a lot of factors that determine individual preferences for vegetables, research is pretty consistent in showing that children eat more vegetables (and just have a better relationship with food overall) when they have a sense of autonomy over their food intake. This means that they are deciding what and how much they are going to eat in response to their own preferences and internal feelings of hunger/fullness. That is, they are eating something because they are intrinsically motivated to do so. In contrast, children who are eating (or not eating) in response to pressure, restriction, or a desire for some sort of reward are being extrinsically motivated - something or someone else is telling them what to do. If you are interested in reading more about intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation and how to support kids’ autonomy in eating, I highly recommend Laura Thomas’ excellent discussion of the topic. A child eating hidden vegetables isn’t really motivated to eat them at all, since she has no awareness of what she is eating. However, this strategy definitely isn’t respecting the child’s autonomy or improving her intrinsic motivation to eat vegetables.
Also, at some point in the not-so-distant future parents will not have control over everything that their child eats. Presumably, you would at some point like your child to consciously and willingly consume a vegetable. Unless you have a particularly adventurous eater (in which case none of this discussion is really relevant), your child will need to have some familiarity with that vegetable and associate it with positive (or at least neutral) feelings before she will voluntarily eat it. And she can only build familiarity and positive associations if she is aware of what she is eating.
Subtle messaging: eventually your child will probably discover that she is not eating the meatball that she has become familiar with, decided that she likes, and voluntarily chosen to eat, but an imposter meatball that has been infiltrated by spinach. This immediately establishes spinach as 1) something that is so undesirable that it needs to be hidden; 2) the evil thing that ruined a food she normally enjoyed; 3) something that someone else wants her to eat so much that they are willing to trick her into doing it. This also sends the message that spinach is not something you think she will enjoy or choose to eat on her own. These are all bad feelings to have about spinach, and will not intrinsically motivate your child to eat it in the future (see #1). There is also a lot of pressure to eat the spinach going on here (extrinsic motivation), and there is a lot of research showing that pressure to eat can often have the opposite effect (we will cover this in more detail another time). Finally, kids aren’t great with subtlety and their bad feelings about spinach are likely to generalize to other, similar foods (i.e. anything green and not M&M-like).
How do you generally want your child to relate to food? Meals and sharing food can be a wonderful source of joy and connection within a family (I mean, this isn’t super consistent with young kids at the table but is at least something to aim for). However, it is difficult to achieve these positive feelings when parents use food as a method of tricking or deceiving their child. This can create all sorts of bad feelings about food. How can the child trust food if they don’t know what might be hiding in there? There are many factors that go into how kids feel about food and the experience of eating, and some kids might just pick out the spinach (or even eat it) and move on. But it’s hard to predict this or to know what messages they are taking away from the experience so it might not be worth the risk.
I want to be clear that all of the above are not arguments again making spinach meatballs or zucchini muffins - the issue is the “hiding” or deception. Pairing new or less-liked foods with other foods that a child does like can sometimes be a way to increase acceptance of those foods (this is called “flavor pairing”, though the evidence on its effectiveness is mixed). It can also be a way to provide positive exposures to vegetables, as long as it is done in a low-pressure and non-sneaky way. My children will eat basically anything that is inside a quesadilla and I regularly use this as a way to expose them to foods that they almost certainly would not eat in other forms. It’s also fine if you have already done the vegetable-hiding thing - you have not forever destroyed your child’s relationship with vegetables. Let’s stick with the spinach meatballs for a minute and walk through one way that parents might use a version of this approach, minus the hiding.
The next time someone in the household makes meatballs, they could add small but visible pieces of spinach. Ideally, just do this with half so that there are regular, familiar meatballs available too.
When a child asks “what’s the green stuff in the meatballs?” cheerfully reply something like: “it’s spinach! We are trying something different this time – let me know what you think! We are also have plain meatballs if you’d like to try both, or choose to have those instead.”
Parents enjoy their meal and avoid reacting to whatever the child decides to do with the spinach. They might refuse to eat the spinach meatball. They might take a tiny bite and then quietly abandon it, or loudly declare their disgust for spinach. They might burst into tears and accuse you of ruining the meatballs (if this is a concern you could definitely offer the more familiar meatballs along with the new version, or maybe just skip this for now). They might just eat the meatball, spinach and all.
Parents do not pressure the child to eat the spinach meatball or overreact to their response, no matter what it is. The goal here should be for the child to have a positive exposure to spinach, which can include anything from eating and enjoying the spinach meatball, observing someone else enjoying it, or simply just having it sit on their plate during a pleasant, low-stress meal (as in, low-stress for them because they aren’t being pressured to eat any specific thing).
A related and important note: I would not recommend trying this approach when your child has requested meatballs for a special occasion. The last thing you want is for your child to forever view spinach as the food that ruined their fourth birthday dinner. Just make the meatballs the way you know that they love them, enjoy the birthday celebration, and try this another time.
In addition to the “pairing” approach described above, there are other strategies for increasing both intake and liking of vegetables. A recent umbrella review, which is a “review of reviews” that super-synthesizes all of the evidence on a topic, identified repeated exposure to vegetables as the most effective way of increasing both liking and intake. You can read more about how this is a great way to increase babies’ acceptance of vegetables here, and this review found that it helped in kids up to 5 years old, which was the oldest age included in this particular review. There was also pretty good evidence in support of parental modeling, which is basically just your child watching you or another parent eating vegetables (as long as you are not openly displaying disgust for them - the point is that you model the reaction that you would like them to have). There was also a small positive effect of “visual exposure” to unfamiliar vegetables, by doing things like reading a picture book with nice pictures of vegetables. I’ll write more about all of these strategies another time. For now, feel free to serve some cauliflower mac and cheese (you are probably incredibly sick of spinach meatballs by now) - but when you child asks what you are having for dinner, consider telling them “cauliflower mac and cheese”.
If you try this let me know how it goes!
Disclaimer: The content provided here is accurate to the best of my knowledge and is intended to be used for informational purposes. It should not be considered a substitute for professional medical advice or treatment.
Excellent information, presented in an informative and fun way. Parents will relate to this and get a lot out of it.