By Jim Lin from The Busy Dad Blog

I thought I was broken. At 4 years of age, one’s assessment of everyday situations pretty much oscillates between extremes. “You’re my best friend” vs “you’re my worstest enemy in the whole wide world!” “This is my FAVORITE food!” vs “YUCK, that’s disgusting times infinity” “I’m Superman; watch me fly” vs “Uh oh, I’m broken. I’m gonna die.”

Sitting on the toilet constipated? Conclusion: broken.

Luckily my mom was there with prune juice, STAT! As I sat there on the bowl sipping this nastiness between rounds of sphincter-robics, mom said “See? You need to eat vegetables.”

And until I discovered coffee, I was damn good at making sure I had at least some form of fiber entering my system on a pretty consistent basis to ensure regularity. I haven’t really touched a vegetable or fruit for about 20 years now, but when my son Fury was born, I chose to adopt the parenting platform of “even if all else fails, at least my kid will eat right.”

And I rocked it.

And so can you. I’d like to share some of my most successful tricks, tips and general philosophies on vegetable (and fruit) eating with you because one constipated kid is one glass of prune juice too many in this world.

The Paradigm

As with all political platforms, schools of thought and religions, one must first accept a basic paradigm upon which to develop one’s methodologies. If you don’t agree with the paradigm, all that stems from it by definition is wrong. So let’s get my basic paradigm out of the way:

I strongly believe that it is more important to get the good stuff into a child’s body than to keep the bad stuff out.

Simple as that. If you don’t agree, there’s no point in reading beyond this. All aboard? Here we go.

The Trojan Horse

There are foods your child likes. There are foods (i.e. fruits and vegetables) that your child will probably dislike. The trick is to use the former to help the latter infiltrate Troy, or whatever your kid’s name may be.

Take broccoli for instance. My kid will eat steamed broccoli as easily as he’ll munch a breadstick. But it wasn’t always like that. I had to employ butter and cheese. My kid loves butter and cheese, and I’d guess most other kids do too (tall blue box ring a bell?). So when Fury was just starting out on solids, I’d grab one, just one, piece of broccoli, put it in a ramekin with a generous pat of butter and a handful of shredded cheese. And I’d microwave that sucker. Then I’d take a fork and mush it until it became one steaming delicious glob of greenish, orange, melty goodness. Over the next few years, I simply ramped down the butter and cheese and ramped up the broccoli. Eventually, I dropped the butter and cheese altogether. He never even noticed. Or didn’t care. Either way, he eats steamed broccoli, people.

This same concept worked for spinach and other vegetables, using variations of “bad” foods such as tempura, quiche, quesadillas and other high fat but mighty tasty Trojan horses. And for fruit? Sugar. Lots and lots of sugar. Your kid won’t eat cantaloupe, you say? Throw it in a blender with a scoop of orange sherbet, vanilla yogurt, ice and milk. More “Insane Crazy Superhero Smoothie” please! Which brings me to my next strategy.

What’s in a name?

Kids are susceptible to marketing. If you don’t believe me, think back to the last person who pitched that pancake puffer to you. Your kid right? (“But daaaad, you can add all your favorite fillings!”) Use this to your advantage. Why call it a pineapple smoothie when you can call it “Mega Tropical Insanity in a Cup”? Does your kid like superheroes? Vision Power-up Sticks (carrots). Dinosaurs? Cretaceous Super Sludge (creamed spinach). You get the idea.

Let ‘em hate

But what about those times when no matter how many layers of empty calories you hide something under, or what awesome Marvel-esque moniker you give it, your kid simply hates a particular vegetable all the same? You go with it. You let that hate flow through him. Nurture it. Because it will become your best ally. The enemy by which all other foods are measured. My kid hates tomatoes. So basically if you present him with something and then say “or this salad with tomatoes,” then suddenly the sautéed zucchini and yellow squash medley looks awful good.

Eyes on the prize

By now, you’re probably thinking, “Poor kid! He’s getting duped by slick marketing names, and eating anything just to avoid a fate of tomatoes.” Well, I’m not that mean. In fact, I’m pretty easy compared to most parents. While the phrase “no dessert until you finish what’s on your plate” has pretty much been the norm across generations of parents, at our house, that’s been modified to simply “no dessert until you finish your vegetables.” Yup, everything else is optional. Why? Because I know the kid won’t die of starvation. Evolution kind of worked out that “when I’m hungry, I’ll eat” thing for me already. When the worse case scenario from my actions is that my kid might become a vegetarian, I probably won’t lose sleep over it. By focusing your child on one reward for just one action, that action no longer seems so insurmountable. Oh, and leaving a big bowl of ice cream just out of reach as he works that salad doesn’t hurt either.

I get by with a little help from my ‘rents

As the judicial, legislative and executive branch of your household, you wield much power in the eyes of your child when it comes to establishing rules regarding good eating. But as much power as you have to enforce the rules, you have just as much power to motivate your child on the last mile of his quest to get through that pile of greens.

I call this the presidential pardon. If you find your child sputtering halfway through dinner, nothing provides a shot of adrenaline quite like taking your fork, stabbing 2 or 3 broccoli spears and eating them for him. You look like a hero, and all of a sudden what’s left on his plate doesn’t seem so bad.

And yup, you guessed it. You put 2 or 3 extra broccoli spears on the plate to begin with.

I’ll admit, my techniques are a teensy bit conniving and just slightly manipulative. But as parents, we must step back and look at the bigger picture: prune juice is disgusting. Times infinity.