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Comment by ImprovedSilence | Hacker News Reader

familiarity breeds comfort.

A common hack to get your kids to eat anything, is to force them to try it at least 10 different times. They always keep spitting it out or crying they don't like it. Eventually one time you feed it to them and they get used to it and like it, as if they never threw a fit with it before. Not everybody's parents did this. That's why there's grown adults that eat nothing but pizza or steak and potatoes...

P.S. that being said, I still don't like broccoli.... Might be one of the only foods I've never liked in any shape or form...

P.P.S. I've had that salty black licorice before when I visited Sweden. I enjoyed it in very small doses.

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Forcing your children to eat things they aren't comfortable with is not a hack. Please do not do this. There is a significant difference between providing a positive environment for your child to encounter new foods and forcing them, physically or otherwise, to eat them.

There's something to be said for this, but I also don't think the GP literally meant forcing them. Forcing children to eat something can cause aversion and eating problems. That said, I am a fan of strongly incentivizing thought promising a later treat for the first few times there's something new to try that I want them to give a fair shake to.

> but I also don't think the GP literally meant forcing them

We only have the GP's words: and at face value, as they should be taken, they do seem to literally mean that.

To a degree. Hyperbole and idioms are a normal part of communication, as is learning to decipher meaning from them.

If someone said something along the lines of "I would kill my son if they did that", would you take that literally, or as a hyperbolic idiom meaning they would be mad at them and punish them?

I think the actual meaning of the statement in question is ambiguous given the above, and providing for the option that you misinterpreted someone's meaning when condemning their speech likely does a lot to keep the discussion civil and useful.

parents actually killing their child is rare. Parents actually making their child eat specific food, with threat of physical force, not so rare. You don't have to search for a figurative meaning where none is needed.

> familiarity breeds comfort.

That's manifestly untrue in some cases. If you like coriander / cilantro, and your child does very much not, would you just feed it to them regularly so that they "get familiar with it"?

That would be bad parenting, and also pointless cruelty to force them to eat "soap" fifty times. Show some empathy, and recognise that your tastes are not necessarily other people's tastes.

https://www.britannica.com/story/why-does-cilantro-taste-lik...

Yeah it's odd. I didn't like coffee much until I got a job stacking shelves as a teenager. I'd walk past the instant coffee section a lot. One day a customer bumped the display and a large jar smashed open on the floor. Cleaning it up and smelling it, I suddenly realised I now liked it.

This doesn't have much to do with polarising tastes such as liquorice.

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