LOVE YOUR GREENS
Recently I heard about a study to discover how to get small children to eat more vegetables. Most children do not eat the recommended number of serves of fruit — and particularly vegetables — in their daily diet.
Two options were tried — offering individual vegetables and offering several vegetables mixed together. The toddlers ate more vegetables when they were mixed together rather than isolated in a single serve.
Most parents take the “hide and seek” approach of sneaking vegetables into other foods, such as bolognaise sauce, muffins and pizzas, but the mixed serve may be another option.
One of the reasons small children are suspicious of vegetables is that we are hardwired to be cautious about eating new things — particularly green things — that may be toxic.
When a fuss is made it can lead to the child digging in its heels and refusing to eat any vegies at all.
Another way to get kids to feel confident about eating their vegies is to grow up in a garden eating the produce that grows there.
A kid that won’t eat a serve of green peas on the dinner plate will often happily eat snow peas picked straight from the vine in the garden. I remember once finding my two children eating grapefruit straight off the tree. I couldn’t believe it, but I was delighted!
A downside of this love affair with homegrown is when they refuse to eat shopbought vegetables on the grounds that “they don’t taste as good as the ones you grow mum” (a direct quote from my daughter after we grew a bumper crop of cucumbers one year).
She refused to eat any bought from the shop — and couldn’t understand why we just didn’t plant more (it was winter).
Growing up gardening
Like my children, I grew up in a gardening family. Not only was my mother a gardener, but so was her mother and grandparents, and also my father’s mother.
We literally grew up in their gardens, absorbing knowledge and information when we thought we were just playing. That time came rushing back to me recently when I was asked to write a story for a gardening magazine about growing macadamias.
When I think of macadamias, I am transported back to being a small child in my grandmother’s Queensland garden.
My brother Peter and cousin David and I spent many hours in that garden.
One of our favourite occupations was gathering the fallen macadamias (we didn’t know them by that name then — they were usually called Queensland nuts), then sitting on the back steps and eating the nuts we’d cracked from their hard brown shells using a hammer on the concrete path.
If we were still at it when Papa came home from work, he’d crack what was left in his vice.
We weren’t allowed to use the vice but evidently a hammer wasn’t an issue! We played happily outside unsupervised, but kids also like it when their parents are also outside.
They don’t want to be involved in gardening when it is presented as a chore or banishment (such as “get outside and play” or “mow the lawn or it’s no pocket money for you”), but will have fun and actually help when they are working with you.
So, if you want them to spend more time outside, you need to be there too (or just give them a hammer and a bag of macadamias!).
Once they are outside, they may develop a love for gardening that lasts a lifetime.