AKA What to Do AFTER Baby-led Weaning

for kids 18 months to 5 years

I – It’s Not Just Luck

Our little kids eat anything: brussel sprouts, olives, kimchi, sour Ethiopian bread, smoked mussels… even garlicky crickets from our Oregon neighbors. 

People say “you’re so lucky to have good eaters,” but it wasn’t luck. It was patience and work. 

I really mean that. Our older kiddo is highly sensitive and rejected almost every new food we ever gave her. Often for months, or in the case of salad, years. “What the hell are these leaves on my plate?” she seemed to say with her eyes. 

To this day she complains occasionally about the temperature, texture, color, taste and portion sizes of the food we offer. But she eats it, and the complaints have become half-hearted. We worked hard to get to that point. 

Of course not every kid or every family can be 100% successful. But I want to be part of rewriting the narrative of what is “kid food.” 

II – No Magic Bullet 

There was no single magic bullet for my kids, just a variety of small tactics. 

Some of these depend on the others. If you follow #3 but don’t follow #4, you’ll end up with way too much work for yourself. And some of this depends on being strict for 10 days until your kid accepts that “this is the way things are.” But the reward lasts 10 years! 

11 Ideas to Get Your Kids Eating Everything

1. Make the food delicious

2. Make weird breakfasts

3. Don’t ever force a kid to eat. No bargaining either 

4. Never offer something only “For Kids”

5. Avoid “Like” or “Don’t Like” and keep trying

6. Food is different than “Treats”

7. Hunger makes everything taste better

8. Let the kids NOT eat.

9. Mix everything into a circular starchy object

10. Literally never give plain white food

11. Finish your plate before seconds

III – The Details

1. Make it Delicious. 

Especially veggies. Don’t give your kid steamed mush broccoli. Roast with a generous pour of olive oil, salt and pepper. Air-fry or deep-fry with a healthy oil. Sizzle it in the skillet. Yum.

Give the kiddos dipping sauces: hummus, tahini, picante, gochugaru, barbecue sauce, ketchup, salsa macha, whole-fat yogurt, soy sauce, plum sauce, salad dressing, horseradish, lime wedge, ponzu, sesame oil, whatever. 

Although a little bit of extra salt is not “perfectly” healthy, it is WAY healthier than having your kid eat mostly starches, sweets, and brown food. If it tastes good to you, it probably tastes good to your kiddo. 

2. Make weird breakfasts

A surprisingly helpful trick. Our kids were always most hungry and most open to random foods in the morning. At dinner they were always halfway full and barely ever ate anything new. This is especially true if they go to day care.

A lot of parents only serve “adult” foods to their kids at dinner. No wonder they think their kids are bad eaters. 

If a kid is not that hungry in the evening, they’ll turn down everything until the grown-ups offer goldfish. 

So we started doing random things for breakfast… toasted salmon-skin from the fish they didn’t eat last night (“salmon bacon”), berry quinoa, fennel with cashew-butter and honey, beet smoothies with candied ginger, kimchi cheesy rice, green eggs and spam….

Like a lot of Americans, even healthy ones, I have a bias toward a bland breakfast, but my kids don’t. At breakfast, they quickly become a better eater than me!

3. Don’t Ever Force a Kid to Eat Something. No Bargaining Either. 

My partner and I know a lot of families for whom mealtime is a complicated business transaction: “Honey, you can’t have any more bread until you take three bites of beans. No, that was only two. Those were little bites, so…” 

We decided not to play that game. Not ever. Never never never. A lot of the rest of the rules came from this first, difficult decision. 

Mealtime was going to be enjoyable, or at least not a power struggle. Food was going to be something for the senses and the body, not something meant to please mom and dad, not connected with guilt and reward. 

I have some mild trauma around my parents forcing me to eat food. And it didn’t even work! I learned that my parents were in control, but I didn’t learn to like anything but brown food.

If you don’t force your kids to eat, there may be some times where they eat no veggies at a particular meal. But a surprising amount of the time my kids ate ONLY veggies, especially when we followed rule #1 Make It Delicious. 

My younger kid still has a hollow leg for roast cauliflower, and my older eats a half-pound of coleslaw when she’s in the mood. 

It does tend to balance out over a week, but we didn’t keep tallies, and although we still game-plan and high-five the good eating days, we made a commitment not to worry too much. 

I can’t prove it, but I imagine this is a healthy attitude for peer pressure. If you are being cajoled by an adult to eat well, you might be learning that people with power control your basic needs. That is a non-starter in my book.

…but all this does NOT mean that kids can eat whatever they want … on to #4. 

4. Never Offer Something Only “For Kids”

Our kids always eat what we eat. After a certain point, we never cooked them a separate meal or offered something like crackers after a meal as a substitute. 

However—and this is a big however—we did adapt the foods we ate as a family based on what the kids would eat. 

Mostly this meant cooking two things instead of a one-pot meal, so there was a choice. The kids could eat one thing and not the other, no big deal. Often we added a salad or a simple fruit or veggie to some meals. Sometimes our kids had stir-fry and pineapple on their plate, but ate only pineapple for dinner. Sometimes they ate only broccoli, no pasta. 

Sadly, for us this meant letting go of spicy food for a couple years, or adding our sauce on the side. I have friends whose kids ate hot curry from 6 months onward, but ours didn’t start until around age 7. I’m sure we could have made this happen, but it wasn’t a priority. We also stopped eating tacos for a couple years (too distressing when they fell apart) and pasta with red sauce (for some reason my kids never ate more than two or three bites of this). All of these became fine somewhere between age 5 and 9, but from 1 to 5 years old it was just not worth it. I imagine the exact foods would differ from kid to kid. 

We also repeated more stuff than I would have liked. Since the kiddos loved it, my partner made tons of vegetable smoothies, and I made scrambled egg & salsa sandwiches every Saturday for months. 

It could be hard sometimes. I missed some dishes, and I got tired of others. But it seemed fair to make some changes. The kiddos deserved some voice in what we all ate. 

If you start this rule before 18 months, I doubt kids would question it. We started this rule at age 3 or 4, and we had about 10 days of resistance from the kids. That was stressful and tiring. I imagine if you start this rule at age 5 you might have 3-4 weeks of resistance. 

But no matter what, it is WAY less stressful than fighting with them for the next 10-20 years. 

5. Avoid “Like” or “Don’t Like” and keep trying

We gave our older toddler salad like twenty or thirty times before she ate a single bite. I think she thought we were crazy. Leaves again? What is wrong with these people? 

Then all of a sudden she ate two plates of salad every dinner for a week. Then she didn’t eat it again for three months. Then it was “leaves only.” Then it was “cucumbers only.” 

Whatever. All this time we just said, “OK, if you’re not hungry for that, eat something else.” 

Like I said at the beginning, many new foods got rejected for months, or they would eat only one bite. 

We just kept offering, and eventually they ate it. It worked like 95% of the time. Eventually, although they still have preferred foods, our kids developed an attitude that “anything can be good if I’m in the mood for it.” 

Using language to reinforce that can be helpful, like saying, “she hasn’t been in the mood for pickles recently” instead of “she doesn’t like pickles.” But it is more of an attitude than any kind of game with words, I still casually use the words “like” and “don’t like” with food. 

To introduce something new, it helped to be a little consistent and not switch it up too much. Like when we started giving tomato-veggie-alphabet soup, we did it twice a week. If they only see a dish once every two months they don’t even recognize it. But if you just keep offering, eventually something deep in their brain lights up, “oh, this is something we are going to be having, I better learn to eat it.” 

6. Food is Different than “Treats.” 

We give our kids ice cream, candy, and cookies from time to time, maybe two or three times a week, particularly when it is a social thing, like at church or a party. I like to take them to a rural Dairy Queen after a hike in the Oregon woods, and they have learned to recognize and love the giant “DQ” out the car window. 

I imagine you could do this daily and not have much of an issue. We call this stuff “treats” and it is different than food. 

Treats don’t follow the same rules as “Food.” For example, bad choices by a kiddo might possibly lead to losing the privilege of going out for a “treat,” but never, ever leads to not getting lunch. In my opinion, access to food should is a basic human right and should not be based on behaviour. In my personal opinion, access to “treats” is different. 

The flip side of this is that sometimes a kid will get a “treat” even if I wouldn’t give them “food.” For example, if they don’t eat dinner, normally I would not offer crackers or whatever instead. But if we went to a bar after dinner, and I ordered french fries, I would not deprive them of this “treat” because they didn’t eat their “food.” Those are two different variables, with different emotions involved. 

Unless it is offered in a quantity of calories that could replace a meal, we just let treats slide or give them other rules.

Our family does not eat “dessert” after meals. Having dessert twice a day is probably not the healthiest habit but I don’t think it’s a big deal. If your family does that, you might consider making dessert a “treat” and not contingent on eating your meal, to avoid kids overeating when they are not hungry, just so they can get a cookie. Maybe limit the size of dessert?

7. Hunger Makes Everything Taste Better

Hundreds of times during the toddler years, the dinner that was rejected at 6pm was wolfed down at 8pm. Or lunch became a snack later. This was one of our secret weapons.

Once you’re hungry, food tastes better. Utilizing this is a game-changer. 

So many parents assume that kids don’t “like” a food because they don’t eat it immediately. If only they would let their kid skip the meal altogether, and take a walk around the block. 

Offer the food again an hour later. No other tactic can do as much as this. Don’t allow the kid to choose whatever food they want —they are way too young for that— but let the kid decide if they want the food from lunch, or to wait for dinnner.

Since “snacktime” is usually a designated set of foods, different from lunch, we didn’t force it and allowed them to eat a snack. Sometimes my kids would eat their original lunch AFTER their afternoon string cheese, but it was not a source of drama. I would just ask, and if they rejected eating their lunch food at 3pm, they could have a cracker or two (not seven), and wait for dinner. 

Since my kids always rejected leftovers the next day, we stopped trying it for meals. That was part of honoring their needs. 

(like a lot of things, leftovers became OK around age 8. I think there is some evolutionary resistance involved, with regard to eating food that should have spoiled without modern technology lol)

8. Let the Kid NOT Eat

Our kids often declined to eat dinner and just went to sleep. I’ve heard from many parents that their kids cram in calories early in the day. Or sometimes they skip lunch. We tried not to worry about it, and we never offered them a more preferred food that wasn’t on the table already. 

This is an obstacle for many parents. People get worried if kids skip a meal, and start offering pretzels or fruit or whatever. Trust me, kids will get the calories they need in their week. They do not need to eat every time you do! It all evens out. 

If my kids skipped lunch, two things could happen. One, they went back and ate it within the next hour or two. Two, they waited until the next meal time. 

Now I wasn’t a tyrant. Snacks are fine. In fact we had snacks daily and didn’t generally schedule or calculate them in any way. But we did not offer a meal-equivalent number of calories from snacks. If the kid wants that much sustenance, they have to eat what we offered at the last meal, or wait to eat the new food at the next meal. 

Again, this guideline took about 10 days to sink in and become a rule they never questioned, but saved us YEARS of headaches. 

I want to honor that this is hard, emotionally, for some parents. But it’s absolutely crucial. 

Hunger is a natural thing that happens sometimes. 

If a child never gets hungry, or views the feeling of hunger as somehow “wrong” rather than a normal, temporary discomfort, it makes healthy eating impossible. 

9. Mix everything together into a circular starchy object

My partner, bless her heart, cooked up an uninmaginable number of savory pancakes with veggies. It turns out kids eat almost anything if it has carbs and is cooked into finger-food with oil and salt in a skillet:

zucchini pancakes, carrot patties, black-bean burgers, beet falafel, broccoli-cheese biscuits, scrambled eggs with rainbow chard, fried plantain slices, Napa nuggets, cilantro-scallion skillet cakes, cranberry-almond muffins, lentil garlic lumps…

10. Literally never give plain white food

This is an extension of the discovery we had above, after the success of veggie skillet cakes. 

After a certain point, my kids never had the option to eat white rice. Or even brown rice. 

Every single time we served rice I spent 30 seconds dicing veggies from the main dish into tiny rice-sized bits, and then mixed them into the rice with a small amount of sauce, so at least they got a tiny taste of kung pao tofu or whatever. They never even saw the plain rice. Before it was even off the counter, it was speckled. 

Bread was served as bruschetta or with a dab of peanut sauce, marinara, gumbo, tzatziki, whatever. Pizza had olives or bell peppers or spinach or pepperoni. Potatoes had scallions and sauce. “Mac & Cheese” was always “Mac & Cheese Peas” and included oregano or basil, whole herbs if our garden had ‘em. If there was chicken, I served it on the bone, and spent the meal laughing with the kids about how to pick the the little bits of meat off.  

This is one of those areas where some extra effort can give some great results, even if you don’t follow the rest of the system. And you can find some recipes that adults love too! 

11. Finish your plate before seconds

OK, so this is a hard one. We didn’t start this until our older was almost 4. 

At a certain point, when the kids were old enough to start verbally pushing back against certain foods, we made a rule: no seconds on anything until the whole plate is finished. 

In other words, if they ate their soy chicken, but not their cheesy broccoli rice, they couldn’t get more chicken until the plate was clean. 

To make this even remotely possible, we gave them VERY SMALL portions of each dish to start with. Like three bites. 

It was a fight for about one week. But no negotiating. We just made a rule, and waited, and bit our tongue during the difficult part. And then, like magic, it became simply “how it is.” 

We didn’t pressure the kids to eat the food. If they didn’t want it, we just said “it’s OK if your tummy isn’t hungry for the chili. You don’t have to eat it.” But we didn’t run to the kitchen for more cornbread. If they wanted, they could leave the table and go play. They often did this. 

If they were hungry, we let them be hungry until the next scheduled time for food. Often this meant that lunch was small and dinner was big, or dinner was slim and next morning’s breakfast was huge. 

But usually they gobbled up dinner about an hour later, or they genuinely weren’t too hungry and didn’t put up much of a fuss. 

I think this step has to be supported by the other rules. By this point, our kids were consistently eating about 80% of what we served them. And like I said, we adapted our cooking. If they consistently rejected something, we stopped cooking it.

Part of the idea behind these rules is that you regard your kids as human beings with an equitable role as eaters in the family. 

You don’t treat them like adults —they need structure— but you honor their taste buds, and their ability to make choices. 

IV – age 5 Years to 10 years

ENJOY YOUR FRICKIN’ DINNER.

(keep making the food delicious)

As I am revising this article, my kids are 7 and 9. Meanwhile we are chillin’ and making whatever food we want. The sacrifices we made for a few years feel very worth it. Dinner is delicious, relaxed and awesome, and has been for years. 

My partner has the kids cooking dinner for us once a week, which they love and look forward to. 

Put the work in early and then enjoy yourself!

that’s all folks