Tag Archives: positive reinforcement

After stumbling on the article Bribing Kids to Eat Their Greens Really Does Work, I have added a new subscription to my blog reader. I really like what Christian Jarrett had to say about using positive reinforcement to encourage children to eat vegetables, learn to like them, and even eat more vegetables when no reward would be given. Rewarding children with stickers or praise for eating healthy food can do more than get them to clean their plates one evening.

After being encouraged to eat a vegetable 12 times in two weeks, children ranked the vegetable higher in preference to other vegetables than they had previously ranked it, and these results remained consistent in follow ups one and three months later. After the two week experimental period, those children that had been rewarded with stickers during the experimental period chose to eat more of the target vegetable when they knew there would be no reward than those children that received no positive reinforcement during the experimental period. In the one and three month reviews, the children praised and the children given stickers maintained their increased voluntary consumption, but the children simply exposed to the vegetable did not.

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