So, I put out a dish of jello or ice cream with all the other food. We also follow Satter’s advice to try to serve the food buffet-style, and let her serve herself from the bowls of peas, carrots, meat, and so on. (The mess is worth it.) And every few days introduce a new food without fanfare, it’s just there on the table. If she asks, we just say “It’s asparagus” or “That’s baby corn”. At first she continued her refusal and just ate the dessert portion, but us really not making a fuss about how dessert and snack food was “special” and she couldn’t have any unless she ate vegetables soon lessened her interest in making it a sore point. We also don’t make comments like “What a good girl you are for eating the broccoli.” Me and my husband talk about the food and ask questions of our daughter kind of like junior restaurant critic! As in “I like how these beans were steamed so they’re still crunchy” and “I think I like carrot sticks dipped in ranch instead of mayonnaise, because I like the dill in the ranch, but mayonnaise is still nice.” Focusing on the texture and taste of the food and encouraging her to explore her palate. We don’t ask her to have the one compulsory bite of everything either, just keep re-introducing the disliked food every so often, without fuss. Most of the time after a few weeks she forgets she’s even wrinkled her nose at it and tries it. We also don’t talk about things like “Don’t eat too many fries, they’re unhealthy” and are encouraging family friends and relatives to not say things like this too, as well as not saying “I ate way too much cake, I’ll have to work it off at the gym now.” This is disengaging the idea of “good” and “bad” foods and setting the stage early for her to have a great relationship with food and hopefully avoid dieting and eating disorders.

And now she is one of the few kids in her pre-school that doesn’t go nuts binging on the candy or chips or cake when it’s available at parties and such, and she doesn’t demand fast food all the time either. She knows we happily have snacks, both of the carrot stick and the fried variety sometimes and might have a fast food meal once every couple of weeks, so there’s nothing special and forbidden about them.

I highly recommend the Ellyn Satter techniques!

I think that really covers it, aside from what others have said about being sure that commentary about one’s cooking is polite and respectful.