Dance, Cook, Eat: Getting Kids to Fall in Love with Their Veggies & Your Kitchen

Getting kids to eat their greens can be the source of dinnertime drama. Who wants drama at dinner time?  There’s enough stress during the day.  Family dinner time is quality time to share, laugh and connect while nurturing our bodies with delicious homemade food.

Here are 5 quick and easy steps to get your kids excited about veggies while encouraging their young palates to grow and develop taste buds that will crave real food instead of processed junk:

Grow a home garden.  Most kids love watching plants grow and get excited to eat the herbs they grow. From hydroponic tomatoes to herb gardens, there are a variety of city friendly indoor ways to grow veggies in the wintertime.  Growing home gardens also shows kids how food grows, and teaches them about life cycles, access to food and making commitment to care for another living being on the planet.

Cook together.  Kids love to help!  Find easy recipes and assign your kids specific tasks to help prepare dinner. Having your children in the kitchen empowers them to develop knowledge about food, how to prepare it and if they helped to prepare and season the veggies, they will love to share and eat it!

Let kids in on the menu planning.  As you are preparing your shopping list for the week, allow your kids to help out.  As an added bonus, they will also learn valuable lessons in creating and sticking to a budget, as well as planning out well balanced meals for the week.

Dance in the kitchen. Music is MAGIC!  Be free!  Turn on some music while you are cooking with your kids.  Kids love to dance and it’s fun to move your body to the music and send love into whatever meals you are making.  These beautiful moments in the kitchen dancing and cooking with love are golden!  They teach kids that food is fun and empowers kids to not take food so seriously.

Focus on what kids can eat rather than what kids can’t eat.  We live in a society of “don’t, can’t and shouldn’t.”  Kids CONSTANTLY have people telling them what they can’t do.  Many kids find freedom in food.  In some cases, when children indulge in junk food, it is an expression of freedom.  Focusing on how eating veggies allows kids to have more fun and raises energy levels so they can play longer and better is information that a kid can use on the playground.

In my movement based nutrition after school program, Eat Well Live Well Kids, we love to make plant based snacks made from organic veggies for after school.  If a kid looks at an avocado they usually just say, “Blech!  I’m not eating that!”  But turning that avocado into guacamole and adding some sweet potato tortilla chips is a TOTALLY different story!  Kids love to make and eat this recipe.  Enjoy!