Every school director knows the challenge: parents often say, “My kids are picky eaters.” Too often, the response at home is to give up and let children make their own unhealthy choices.
But there’s a better way. The real solution is to encourage children to enjoy healthy foods.
The question is, how do you make that happen?
One thing we know for certain: forcing kids rarely works.
There’s a story of a farmer struggling to push his pig into the pen. The harder he pushed, the more it resisted. His wife simply tossed an apple inside, and the pig walked in willingly.
The lesson is clear: when it comes to children, motivation works better than pressure.
And junk food companies know this better than anyone. They don’t push; they entice, using fun, creativity, and positive experiences to change behavior.
Why is fun important?
Because what people enjoy as kids shapes their behavior as adults.
So, to create lifelong healthy eaters, the question to ask is, “How can we make healthy food as fun as possible for our kids?”
Start with this:
Upgrade their favorites.
We often think healthy eating means banning unhealthy foods. No more ice cream! No more cookies! No more chicken nuggets!
But our take?
Don’t demonize their favorite foods.
Upgrade them into healthy, nutritious versions instead.
Take the fast food favorite:
Chicken nuggets.
Here’s what you’d typically find in the ingredients of a fast food chicken nugget:
Chicken, Water, Vegetable Oil (Canola Oil, Corn Oil, Soybean Oil, Hydrogenated Soybean Oil), Enriched Flour, Bleached Wheat Flour, Yellow Corn Flour, Vegetable Starch (Modified Corn, Wheat, Rice, Pea, Corn), Salt, Leavening (Baking Soda, Sodium Aluminum Phosphate, Sodium Acid Pyrophosphate, Calcium Lactate, Monocalcium Phosphate), Spices, Yeast Extract, Lemon Juice Solids, Dextrose, and Natural Flavors. Dimethylpolysiloxane is added as an antifoaming agent.
What is hydrogenated soybean oil? Dimethylpolysiloxane? What is sodium aluminum phosphate?
But you could make an incredibly nutritious (and tastier) version at home with just 7 natural ingredients:
– high quality chicken
– flour
– free-ranged eggs
– olive oil
– garlic
– paprika
– salt.
So, a simple way to get kids eating more healthy food? Make it more convenient than unhealthier options. As nutritionist Rhiannon Lambert puts it,
“What’s the easiest thing for kids to find in your kitchen?”
(The snack drawer? Chips in the cupboard? Soda in the fridge?)
Here’s a weird thing psychologists discovered:
When people make something themselves: a coffee mug, birthday cards, or an origami swan, they end up liking and valuing it more. This is called the “IKEA effect” and applies to just about anything. IKEA stands for houses, furniture, and especially food.
So a good rule of thumb?
If you want kids to like healthy food, get them cooking it themselves.
We see this all the time in our afterschool cooking program.
Students have a blast cooking it with their friends?
They absolutely love it.
And really, that’s the whole point of LIFT Enrichment workshops. With our chef teachers, we take kids through recipes in a cooking program that:
- a) teaches them kitchen skills, cooking, and the basics of nutrition
- b) gets kids excited about tasting new, nutritious foods.
If you’d like to encourage healthy eating in your school, and you wonder how an afterschool cooking program would work (plus the grants available to fund it), you can book a free call with one of our team by clicking the link below: