Hidden Carrots and Secret Stashes: How Parents Really Get Kids to Eat Fruit and Vegetables

Getting a ten-year-old to eat an apple sounds simple. Getting most Swedish children to eat the half a kilogram of fruit and vegetables recommended each day turns out to be anything but. A qualitative study published in BMC Public Health has now lifted the lid on how parents of 10-to-12-year-olds actually think about fruit and vegetables, what they believe about their health effects, and the sometimes surprising tactics they deploy at the dinner table. The findings reveal a striking gap between what public health authorities say and what parents understand, along with a rich taxonomy of parental feeding styles that ranges from covert vegetable smuggling to philosophical debates about whether an organic apple is worth the extra money.

The research team, led by Hannah Helgegren of the University of Gothenburg together with Anna Winkvist and Christel Larsson, interviewed fifteen parents, twelve mothers and three fathers, recruited through seven schools in southern Sweden. The sample was deliberately diverse, spanning families in low, medium and high socioeconomic areas of a multicultural city and a smaller village, with household incomes ranging from roughly 20,000 to more than 80,000 euros per year. Each parent took part in an individual semi-structured interview lasting between 46 and 80 minutes, using colour photographs of 53 different fruits, vegetables and berries to anchor the conversation. The interviews were transcribed and analysed using inductive thematic analysis, a method that lets themes emerge from the data rather than testing predetermined hypotheses.

The urgency behind the study is easy to grasp. According to the latest Swedish national dietary survey, only about five percent of children in fifth grade meet the national recommendation of 500 grams of fruit and vegetables per day. Mean intake was 247 grams for girls and just 200 grams for boys, and this included vegetables served with the free, subsidised hot lunch that all Swedish schoolchildren receive. Since children eat most of their meals at home, their intake ultimately depends on what parents buy, prepare and put on the table. Yet while feeding practices among parents of preschoolers have been studied extensively, the parents of older children, an age group whose consumption is the lowest of any Swedish school cohort, have remained largely unexamined from their own perspective.

What emerged first from the analysis was a picture of well-meaning but incomplete knowledge. All parents viewed fruit and vegetables as beneficial, citing vitamins and minerals as the main reason for serving them, but almost none could state the actual recommendation of 500 grams per day. When asked to guess, most estimates fell below the true figure, clustering around 100 to 350 grams, which happens to mirror the average intake of Swedish adults. One parent guessed 100 grams, remarking that it is hard enough to eat a single apple daily. Many parents also focused on vegetables almost exclusively at dinner, overlooking the breakfast, snack and lunch occasions that could carry a family toward the recommended total. The result is a quiet mismatch: parents who believe they are doing reasonably well, and who rate their family’s intake between 7 and 10 on a satisfaction scale, while the national data suggest otherwise.

Perhaps the most counterintuitive finding concerns sugar. Several parents worried that fruit contains too much sugar and needed to be restricted, a concern sometimes reinforced by personal trainers who had advised them that fruit sugars spike blood glucose. One family kept a secret stash of citrus fruit in the house, placing only two pieces at a time in the refrigerator, because one child would otherwise, in the father’s words, chew all day. Another parent declined to serve the traditional cabbage salad alongside homemade pizza, fearing the seasoning might contain added sugar. These worries stand in stark contrast to national dietary data showing that most free sugar in Swedish adolescents’ diets comes from sweets, pastries and especially sugar-sweetened beverages, while fruit juice contributes eleven percent of free sugar and no added sugar at all. The researchers suggest that such misconceptions can lead to unnecessary restriction of foods that children should, if anything, be eating more of.

The interviews also exposed a noisy and often untrustworthy information landscape. Parents described learning about food from childhood memories of the food pyramid, from colleagues at work, from grandparents, from podcasts and Instagram, and from sports clubs, sometimes receiving contradictory advice along the way. One mother recalled a colleague insisting that children must eat fruit before every snack and before bed. Another remembered a 1976 bread-industry commercial claiming that the health authorities wanted everyone to eat six to eight slices of bread a day, a message that many Swedes still mistake for an official guideline. Several parents expressed scepticism about organic produce, ranging from careful pesticide-related purchasing decisions to outright dismissal of organic labels as marketing. Others noted that vegetables receive almost no advertising compared with brightly packaged processed foods engineered to catch children’s eyes in the supermarket.

From these five themes, spanning knowledge and beliefs, information sources, family preferences and resources, parental agency, and intentions, the researchers distilled four conceptual parental roles. The Enforcer ensures immediate intake through direct strategies: grating carrots and onions so finely into the bolognese that children never know, applying pressure, and setting rules such as one piece of fruit per day. The Accommodator works through access and preference, keeping carrot and cucumber sticks ready during the pre-dinner ‘hell hour’, cutting fruit into pieces with a sprinkle of cinnamon, and letting children add items to the grocery list. The Teacher builds knowledge and skills, explaining why the body needs vegetables, listening to podcasts about gut bacteria together, and letting children chop, peel and even sculpt fruit in the kitchen. The Role Model simply eats the broccoli, operating on the conviction that children do what parents do, not what they say.

These roles are not mutually exclusive categories into which families can be sorted; a single parent may hide vegetables in Monday’s sauce, negotiate the shopping list on Tuesday, and invoke ‘monkey see, monkey do’ by Wednesday. Instead, the researchers present them as a continuum running from direct influence on present consumption to indirect, future-oriented influence through habit and learning. The framework also connects to a substantial body of quantitative research. Previous studies suggest that verbal encouragement and praise help younger children eat more fruit and vegetables but show no significant effect among older children, for whom negotiation, autonomy support and home availability matter more. Pressure to eat, meanwhile, has repeatedly been linked to lower acceptance, although the researchers caution that coercion may sometimes be a response to a child’s low intake rather than its cause, and may be less harmful within an otherwise warm family environment.

The study has limitations worth noting. Fifteen interviews cannot represent all Swedish families, and the participants, two-thirds of whom had more than twelve years of education compared with a national average of 58 percent, may simply be more interested in food than the typical parent. Twelve of the fifteen interviewees were mothers, so paternal perspectives are underrepresented, and the distinctly Swedish context of free school meals and subsidised healthcare shapes the findings in ways that may not transfer elsewhere. Still, the depth and candour of the accounts, from a father who would rather drink a beer than eat a banana for the same calories, to a mother who forces herself through broccoli because of cancer worries, give the analysis genuine texture.

The practical takeaway is deceptively simple. Parents in the study generally knew why fruit and vegetables matter but were hazy on how much, how often, and how to weave them through the whole day rather than piling them onto the dinner plate alone. The authors argue that public health messaging needs to move beyond exhortation and offer accessible, concrete guidance on amounts and everyday strategies, while also addressing the sugar-in-fruit misconception that leads some families to restrict exactly the foods they should embrace. The four parental roles, meanwhile, could give healthcare professionals a shared vocabulary for talking with families about feeding, meeting parents where they already are, whether they are smuggling courgette into pasta or teaching a child why the Lukes in her gut bacteria need their vegetables.

Subject of Research: Parental perspectives and feeding strategies influencing fruit and vegetable consumption among 10-12-year-old children in Sweden

Article Title: Parents’ perspectives and roles in influencing 10–12-year-old children’s fruit and vegetable consumption: a qualitative study in Sweden

Article References: Helgegren, H., Winkvist, A., & Larsson, C. (2026). Parents’ perspectives and roles in influencing 10–12-year-old children’s fruit and vegetable consumption: a qualitative study in Sweden. BMC Public Health, 26(1), Article 2953. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-026-29852-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12889-026-29852-2

Keywords: fruit and vegetable intake, child nutrition, parental feeding practices, qualitative research, Sweden, public health, dietary recommendations, sugar misconceptions, parental roles, thematic analysis, school-age children, health behaviour