9 ways to get a toddler to try a new food

A toddler is far more likely to taste something new when trying it costs her almost nothing. Most of what follows is about lowering that cost: on the plate, in the hour before dinner, and in what you say while she decides.

None of this is about persuading her. Persuasion is the part that backfires, and there is an experiment on preschoolers showing children ate less food when an adult prompted them to eat. So these are nine ways to change the conditions around a new food, aimed at things already on your table that she is cleared to eat.

Three that happen before she sits down

1. Let her touch it before anyone asks her to eat it. Handling a food is a smaller ask than swallowing it, and it appears to do real work. In a study of 62 preschoolers aged three to four, one session of sensory play with real fruit and vegetables led children to taste more foods afterward than either watching the same play session or doing a non-food play activity. The effect held for five foods used in the activity and for three foods that were not. Washing, sorting, tearing, and squashing all count. So does letting her push the bowl around while you cook.

2. Give her a job. In a trial with 47 children, half prepared lunch with a parent and half had the parent cook alone. The children who cooked ate 41.7 grams more salad, about 76 percent more, and reported feeling more positive and more in control afterward. Worth being straight about the ages: those children were six to ten, older than the reader of this page. What transfers is the mechanism rather than the number. For a two-year-old the job is small and slow: stirring something cold, putting cut pieces in a bowl, pressing the button on the blender, carrying her own plate to the table.

3. Put it out when she is hungriest. The new thing has the worst odds at the end of a meal, when she is full and finished with the whole idea. Set a small amount of it on the table in the ten minutes before dinner is served, while you are still moving pans around and nobody has been asked to sit anywhere. That window is the most honest appetite of the evening.

Three that are about the plate

4. One new thing, not a new plate. A dinner where three of four items are unfamiliar does not read as three chances to try something. It reads as a different meal, and it gets refused as a unit. Keep the plate recognizable and let one item be the unknown.

5. Put it beside something she already eats. Not as a bribe or a trade, just as a neighbor. The rice, the bread, the yogurt, the fruit she never turns down. She then has something safe in front of her the entire time, which means tasting the new thing is optional rather than load bearing. This is the same principle as putting a safe component on the plate when a toddler refuses dinner, used earlier in the sequence.

6. Change the form, not the food. A rejected food is not settled, because a toddler is often rejecting a texture rather than a flavor. Sweet potato roasted in wedges, mashed with butter, and blended into a soup are three different offers to her even though they are one item on your grocery list. White beans are a different food whole in a bowl than mashed onto toast. Before you retire something for the season, serve it two more ways.

Three that happen at the table

7. Say you like it out loud. Quietly setting a good example does less than parents are told. Across a set of preschool studies, silent adult modeling failed to improve acceptance of either familiar or new foods, while enthusiastic modeling, an actual spoken "I love this", kept children accepting a new food across five consecutive meals. These were small classroom studies, and one of them found the effect disappeared once a competing peer model was at the same table, so hold it loosely.

There is a real distinction here, and it is the difference between this working and backfiring. Enthusiasm is pointed at the food and at your own dinner. It is not a pitch pointed at her, and it is not followed by looking at her plate to see whether it landed. "This roasted broccoli is really good" is modeling. "This roasted broccoli is really good, do you want to try some?" is a prompt, and prompting is the thing the pressure research keeps finding costs you eating.

8. Let her put it on her own plate. Serve family style where you can, with the new food in a bowl in the middle and a spoon she can reach. A toddler who takes one piece herself has made a decision. A toddler who finds it already on her plate has been handed one. It is a small transfer of control, and control is most of what she is defending.

9. Make it easy to stop. Put a napkin next to her and tell her once, plainly, that she can take food out of her mouth if she does not like it. No requirement to finish the bite, no "just swallow it". A first taste is a much cheaper experiment when quitting is allowed halfway through, and a child who has been made to finish one bad mouthful will remember that before she remembers the food.

The two that reliably backfire

The one bite rule. It converts the food into a toll. She now has to get through the broccoli to reach the rest of dinner, which teaches exactly the association you are trying to avoid, and the pressure research above suggests it lowers intake rather than raising it.

Using it as the price of something else. Dessert for two carrots is a working trade in the moment and a bad long-term deal, because it tells her which food on the table is the good one. If the answer to "why should I eat this" is a reward, she has learned that the food itself is not the reason.

Hiding a vegetable in a sauce sits somewhere in between. It is a perfectly good way to cook and there is no reason to stop. Just do not count it as an attempt, because she cannot come to accept a food she does not know is there.

How long this takes

Longer than one dinner, and less time than it feels like on the third night.

Repeat exposure is the thing that actually moves acceptance, and it is slow enough that most families stop before it works. The specific numbers, including a trial that put a fourteen day protocol behind it, are in the post on what to do when a toddler refuses dinner. The practical version: a food that was turned down goes back into the ordinary rotation rather than onto a list of things she does not eat.

That is easier to hold if the rotation is written down somewhere, because willpower on a Tuesday is a worse system than a short planning routine on Sunday. Put the rejected thing back in next week alongside a dinner you know works.

When this is not a trying problem

Everything above assumes an ordinary toddler being cautious about ordinary food, which describes most of them.

Some things are not that. Talk to your pediatrician if the list of foods she accepts is getting shorter rather than slowly longer, if she is dropping foods she reliably ate before, if she gags on textures she used to handle, if mealtimes are distressing rather than tedious, or if you have any question about a specific food being right for her. Those have real clinical answers, and none of them are strategy problems to solve at the table.

Common questions

How many times do I have to serve something before it counts?

More than most people expect, and the count is not a countdown to a guaranteed yes. Repeated, unpressured offers are what shift acceptance, so the useful frame is a rotation rather than a tally. Keep the food in the normal rotation for several weeks before you conclude anything.

Should I make her taste it?

No. A required taste turns the food into an obstacle and hands you the one part of the job you cannot do anyway, which is the swallowing. Offer it, let her decline, and serve it again another night.

She liked it last week and refused it tonight. What changed?

Probably nothing you can act on. Toddlers are genuinely inconsistent, and one refusal does not move a food off the accepted list. The mistake is deleting it after a bad night, because then it stops getting the repeat offers that would have carried it.

Does it help to talk about the food being healthy?

Not at this age, and sometimes it works against you. Framing a food as good for her marks it as the one being pushed. Describing it instead, crunchy, warm, sweet, orange, gives her something to check against without asking anything of her.

The one thing to take away

Make trying cheap. One unfamiliar thing on an otherwise familiar plate, something safe next to it, a napkin she is allowed to use, and you enjoying your own dinner out loud.

Then serve it again next week, and do not mention that you are doing it.