Digital ‘Hidden Veggies’
You know that adorable baby who wolves down pureed vegetables and happily gums on steamed broccoli and cauliflower? They change. Oh yes, they do. At some point, it becomes a struggle to get that same child to eat even sweet carrots. Nutritious vegetables that do general awesome stuff to kids’ bodies and minds suddenly become a cause for battle. But it is a battle that parents happily fight. We love the little buggers and we know that though they’d rather eat frosted cookies all the time, it would be cruel for us not to intervene. Enter hidden veggies. Whoever got this brilliant idea to mix in and camouflage healthy veggies into the enticing foods that kids love, we thank them.
Digital content comes in ‘junk’ and ‘healthful’ too
When it comes to helping our kids eat what we consider to be right, parents have become ninjas. There is pretty much a hidden veggie version of every food that kids love – pizzas, smoothies, pies, cakes, cookies, even mac and cheese where you think the jig would be up easily. But thanks to our darn technological progress, food for the body isn’t the only type of diet that we need to be keeping an eye on.
The new space where you can flat on your face as a parent is now in digital diets. Digital content also comes in junk and healthful! Just like with foods, junk digital content is mostly what the kids would gravitate to without any supervision. Healthful digital content is the stuff that makes you feel like you’re winning as a parent. Think of the digital equivalent of a tasty salad – giving taste buds a party while it does the body good.
Let’s be honest, the ratio of junk to healthful digital content in what we let our kids consume is embarrassingly high. Adulting is hard. Plus, add on the newness of our digital era and we are in a deeper hole. You can’t use grandma’s tricks and tips because she never had to deal with what a 5-year-old should watch.
How to serve up digital ‘hidden veggies’
Here is the not-so-big secret (come on, it’s in the title). There are digital ‘hidden veggies’! Yeah! This post is about how to take all the ninja moves from serving up healthful food to the kids, and use them to serve up healthful digital content.
So without further ado, here are some tips
Don’t tell the kids that what they are doing is educational!
This is rule number one. You don’t tell kids there is spinach in the chocolate smoothie otherwise you have spoiled the allure and no one will drink it! Pull out the reverse psychology that makes you the parent and not the child. Be cas (casual but cool casual). Don’t jump up and down with joy that they are learning division. Act the way you would when they wolf down spaghetti sauce with zucchini blended in there.
Use edutainment that is the right balance of edu- and tainment.
There are two risks to not having balance. First is that it is so clear that it is a ‘learning’ thing that your cover is broken and cooperation from the child fades away. Second is that there is so much junk content that you’re just making a bad situation worse.
Just like in cooking hidden veggie recipes, you need to take the pains to replicate the texture and the taste of the original. It is not easy to get edutainment right. Shows like Science Max and Operation Ouch make it look easy but there are many sorry attempts at edutainment that kids will reject. Not all edutainment is the same quality. In fact, some ‘edutainment’ is really still junk content.
Learn from others – Borrow digital hidden veggie recipes.
Don’t reinvent the wheel. Just like with hidden veggie recipes, you don’t have to do all the experimentation to find the recipes that do the job. In Anetaland we get you started – every week we point out a digital gem aka a digital hidden veggie that you can put in front of your kids. But the gem of the week is only the beginning. With the ability to receive and share Anetapacks which are essentially playlists or websites and apps, you never have to find your own digital hidden veggie recipes. You’re welcome.
One of the selfless acts of parenting is that we try to do for our kids what we can’t even do for ourselves. We are probably being owned by our devices and filling up junk digital content. But that only means that we will try hard to get some digital hidden veggies into our kids’ diets. The best part is, like with edible recipes, we can find that the content is just as ‘delicious’ for adults as they are for kids.
