Is it OK to bribe children to eat vegetables?

We all know the ruse of bribing children with the promise of a sweet dessert or other treat if they eat their vegetables. But this can possibly do more harm than good. Nick Fuller, writing for The Conversation, discusses this.

Why bribing may backfire

Offering children treats as a reward for eating healthy food can:

Create unhealthy preferences

Studies show using discretionary foods such as sweets as rewards increases children’s preference for those foods.

Over time, children start to see dessert as the “prize” and vegetables as the “chore.” This skews their perception of food value and can lead to an unhealthy relationship with eating.

Bribes also link food with achievement or behaviour, which may foster emotional eating patterns later in life.

Disrupt appetite regulation

Children are born with the ability to self-regulate how much they eat, based on internal signals between the gut, brain, and hormones. It’s common for appetite to fluctuate—ravenous one day, disinterested the next—depending on activity, growth and development.

However, food rewards can override these natural cues. When children learn to eat to earn a reward rather than to satisfy hunger, research suggests it can increase the risk of overeating.

Increase fussy eating

Fussy eating is a normal phase in early childhood and typically improves once children start school.

But pressuring children to eat, especially with the promise of a reward, can make them even more resistant to trying new foods. Several studies show food rewards are linked to greater food fussiness over time.

What to do instead: evidence-backed strategies

Instead of resorting to bribes, here are research-informed ways to support healthy eating habits in children:

Focus on effort, not outcomes

It can take eight to 10 exposures before a child accepts a new food. So keep offering it without pressure.

Praise your child for trying something new, rather than for finishing their plate.

Let them decide whether to eat it—and how much. The goal is to build positive experiences around food.

Pair new foods with familiar favourites

Children are more likely to try unfamiliar foods when served alongside ones they already enjoy. So if your child loves potato chips, try introducing roast carrot “orange chippies” as a variation.

Offering the same food in different formats (such as avocado in sushi one day, on crackers another) also increases acceptance.

Make healthy food visually appealing

Studies show kids respond better to food presented in fun and colourful ways. Use different shapes, textures, and colours to make meals more inviting—think fruit skewers, rainbow veggie plates, or “build-your-own” meals.

Involve children in the kitchen

Children are more likely to eat food they’ve helped prepare. Even young children can assist with age-appropriate tasks like mixing, measuring, or choosing recipes.

Model the behaviours you want to see

Children learn by watching. Research shows that when parents regularly eat and enjoy healthy foods in front of their kids, these children have better diets than their peers who don’t see their parents enjoy healthy foods.

Try to share meals as a family when possible and model the enjoyment of nutritious foods.

Provided by The Conversation

Image supplied by Freepik

← Previous Next →

Martin Doherty, writing for The Conversation, says that at the age of about four, children reach important milestones in brain development.

One of these is a huge improvement in understanding others’ thoughts and feelings. This is the start of empathy. Another is in spatial thinking—understanding how objects are positioned and related. This is the beginning of the ability to read maps.

Martin and his colleague, Catherine Sayer, conducted a study with 175 two to five-year-olds to explore how children are able to use scale models to figure out where something is in the real world. At about four, children are able to use a scale model of a room to work out where something is. We thought that this might result from children’s understanding of how one thing can represent something else. But we actually found that four-year-olds’ ability to use scale models came from their spatial abilities.

At the same age, children start to understand that someone’s behaviour is due to what that person believes, not necessarily what is really the case. This has interesting consequences.

If you’ve played hide-and-seek with young children, you may have noticed that they aren’t always very good at it. They love the ritual of looking in all the wrong places first, but beforehand they may tell you where they are going to hide, hide in the same place every time, or not be especially hidden.

After their fourth birthday, they get much better at hide and seek. They understand that the seeker looks in the wrong places because they don’t know where the hider is.

At about three to four children also start to tell lies. They realize they can make someone believe something that isn’t true.

Understanding symbols

Martin’s earlier research with fellow psychologist Josef Perner suggests that four-year-olds don’t just start to understand how others’ minds work. Figuring this out is part of the development of an understanding of “representation”—that symbols, like thoughts, words, or pictures, can be used to stand for something else.

Children start to think about how words relate to objects. This means, for instance, knowing that “animal” can refer to something you already have a name for, such as “rabbit”. This might help children learn the new word.

Their ability to use a understand the components of pictures also improves around this age. Very young children use a lot of trial and error to complete a jigsaw, picking up random pieces to see if they fit. By the time they are about four years old, they start to use the picture as a guide, trying to connect lines and match bits of colour, while checking the guide picture on the box lid.

Developmental experiments

Another ability children develop at around four is using scale models. A classic set of developmental experiments involved a model of a regular household room. The real room had typical furniture—sofa, table, cupboard and so on—and the model had miniature versions laid out in the same way.

Children were shown where something was hidden in the model and told to find an object hidden in “the same place” in the room. Children of around four can find the object using the identical layouts. If shown a sticker under a particular chair in the model room, for example, they can go straight to the “same” chair in the other room. This is the fundamental understanding required to read maps.

Adults see scale models and maps as representations. Maps represent a town or a country. A scale model of, say, the Eiffel Tower represents the real thing. At first, Martin suspected children’s ability to use scale models is more evidence of understanding representation at this age.

He was wrong. Instead, the researchers found that this ability is based on a development in children’s spatial abilities that also occurs at about four. This is the ability to think about spaces and where objects are within them. Spatial abilities help with maths skills, and good spatial ability is linked to an interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Their experiment was simple. They compared the model room task with a test of understanding how representation works. The two abilities develop around the same age, but they found they were not related. Children who could do one task couldn’t necessarily do the other.

They also had a test of purely spatial ability. Children who passed the model room task also passed the spatial task. So it looks like the model room task relied on children‘s spatial thinking.

They don’t yet know why two important but apparently unrelated abilities arise at the same time. Perhaps it’s related to changes in the growing brain at this interesting age.

Provided by The Conversation.

Image supplied by Freepik.