5 Tips To Help Introduce Your Kids To New Foods

Once upon a time my kids ate everything. They were babies. Clean slates. Everything I fed to them, they ate. Okay maybe that’s my nostalgia at work here, but I remember fondly Brady gleefully stealing broccoli off my plate when he finished his own. I remember Kyle mashing avocado into his chubby little face. And I found photographic evidence that Kyle once liked broccoli and mango, neither of which he will even taste now:

Sigh. Those days are long gone. But I haven’t given up. I do still put new foods out for the kids to try, and Brady has proven to be the more adventurous eater. I mean just look at his little face:

And he still eats spaghetti, with sauce. Sadly, Kyle won’t even eat sauce anymore.

With him, it’s more about rewards. Lately, my tactic is to beg or bargain: “PLEASE try this food that I made.” Or “if you try it, I’ll let you play 10 more minutes of video games…”

Here is Tip Number 19 from Team Kellogg’s:

(To see more Great Starts Tips visit )

I agree with all of the tips Kellogg’s has provided, and I have actually tried them all with varying degrees of success – except for the Healthy Heroes tip and the new location. These two are going in my back pocket to whip out when we go to the shore and want them to eat fish, or when they are preparing for a sports event and might be motivated by the idea of performing well like a famous player.

So far though, my favorite tip is hiding food in other foods. Some of my easiest go-to’s are pureed butternut squash (hide in macaroni and cheese), pureed cauliflower (hide in homemade hamburgers and meatballs) and pureed pumpkin, which I don’t even have to hide, actually, because the kids like it in their pancakes.

Adding pumpkin puree to the pancakes was a daring move, though, because the other time I tried to sneak a healthy puree into pancakes, it was a disaster. That was when I experimented with beet puree. Despite its cheerful appearance, the batter turned into pancakes that nobody liked.

(That story is called Massacre in the Kitchen. Enjoy.)

Kellogg’s® believes that From Great Starts Come Great Things®. So we’re helping Moms start every day with a tip from the top athletes of Team Kellogg’s™ and Team USA dietitians. The thirty days leading up to the Sochi 2014 Olympic Winter Games will each feature fun pieces of advice to help families fuel just like the athletes of Team Kellogg’s. To see all 30 tips, visit

Compensation was provided by Kellogg’s via Glam Media. The opinions expressed herein are those of the author and are not indicative of the opinions or positions of Kellogg’s.