Make Your Little Kids Eat Their Dinner by Tossing a Coin
If you have a young child, there is probably some kind of culinary battle raging in your home. They don’t want to sit in one place long enough to eat, they don’t want to eat it, or they don’t want to eat anything .
Reddit user u / jlfern figured out how to feed his four-year-old daughter: teach her how to flip a coin.
Heads – she took a bite of broccoli; Tails – she bit off the quesadillas. She finished her lunch for the first time in months. I won every coin toss.
I can imagine that the main thing here is to let the child toss the coin himself. They will be interested in the game, not broccoli.
Of course, this tactic is not suitable for every child. Or it will work brilliantly once and never again. If so, here are some more ideas from the commenters on Reddit and Lifehacker:
- Roll the dice (literally) – whatever number they roll, that is how many bites they have to make.
- Tell them to bite off five more bites and then count with them. “We count them out loud and just keep counting after 5 until his plate is empty, often counting up to 15 small pieces,” says Reddit user u / Koevis.
- Use their age to determine how many more bites they need to bite off; this number continues to grow over time.
- Line them up or make a fun shape and count them as they eat.
- Stick to the rule of “bite off at least once before you say no, thanks.” We used this with my son when he was younger, and while it’s ineffective at getting them to eat a lot of things they don’t like, he really took the fight out of trying something new.