If You Can’t Get Your Kids to Eat Their Veggies…

Posted By elissa on Feb 17, 2011 | 2 comments

…try a bribe. According to a study published in the journal “Psychological Science,” there’s a good chance it will work.

Some experts have warned that bribing children to eat healthy foods can be counter-productive, undermining their intrinsic motivation and actually increasing disliking. Lucy Cooke and colleagues have found no evidence for this in their new large-scale investigation of the issue. They conclude that rewards could be an effective way for parents to improve their children’s diet. ‘…rewarding children for tasting an initially disliked food produced sustained increases in acceptance, with no negative effects on liking,’ they said.

Over four hundred four- to six-year-olds tasted six vegetables, rated them for taste and then ranked them in order of liking. Whichever was their fourth-ranked choice became their target vegetable. Twelve times over the next two weeks, most of these children were presented with a small sample of their target vegetable and encouraged to eat it. Some of them were encouraged with the reward of a sticker, others with the reward of verbal praise, while the remainder received no reward (a mere exposure condition). A minority of the children formed a control group and didn’t go through an intervention of any kind.

…At one- and three-month follow-up, the intervention children’s increased liking of their target vegetable was sustained regardless of the specific condition they’d been in. However, in terms of increased consumption (when given the opportunity to eat their target vegetable, knowing no reward would be forthcoming), only the sticker and verbal praise children showed sustained increases.

LOL – my son could have used this intervention… as a toddler, he was quite the picky eater. I used to hide veggies and fruit in smoothies and other dishes that lent themselves to concealment (like spaghetti sauce). Of course, he’s outgrown that phase (for the record, he turns 21 next week), so it’s all water under the bridge. Still, if you’ve got recalcitrant kiddies, small, non-food bribes could be worth a try… particularly since there’s a lot less work involved.