Stick it to them: the way to deal with fussy eaters Bribing children to eat doesn't work. It's common knowledge. If you tell a child, "Eat up your spinach and you can have a chocolate," it will only learn that spinach is punishment and chocolate is a treat. Yet in those frazzled early years of feeding a child, almost every parent does resort to rewards. I've done it myself - five bites of fish for a bowl of ice cream! And I should know better, given that I've written a column in the past on the fallacy of food rewards. But now it turns out we were all wrong. Rewards can persuade a child to eat their greens. We just need to go about it in a slightly different way. Dr Lucy Cooke is a researcher at University College London whose expertise is ways of improving children's diets. She and her colleagues argue that "rewards only work when kids feel they have worked for them." As parents know, it is common for a child to declare, "I don't like it," before it has even tried the food on its plate. If outright bribery doesn't work and confrontation only results in misery, what options are left to us parents? Cooke and her fellow psychologists have developed a carefully nuanced approach to the problem and carried out a series of studies, in primary schools and families. Every day for two weeks children were asked to take "tiny tastes" of a raw vegetable they did not care for: carrot, celery, tomato, cucumber or pepper. When rewarded with a sticker for each taste, they ate more of the veg than requested, and often ended up with a permanent taste for it. In the past, when Cooke had done similar studies, there would be a hard core of 20 per cent who point blank refused to try the food. But, once stickers were introduced, "we had 100 per cent compliance." Cooke has distilled her research into a colourful pack for families called Tiny Tastes. In an ideal world, it would be handed out to new parents by every health visitor in the country. In the meantime, you can order it for £5.99 plus £2 p&p from weightconcern.org.uk. I tried it with my four-year-old, whom I had previously - unfairly - labelled as "the fussy one." Within a fortnight this system had not only converted him to cabbage but changed the whole stressful conversation around food. Here's how it works. The child picks a veg it doesn't like (but not something it is intensely scared of or disgusted by). It draws a picture of the food on a special sheet. Every day for 14 days, not at a mealtime, you offer a minuscule taste - as small as a 5p coin. Not tasting is no big deal, but every attempt, even just a lick, wins a tick and a sticker. My son got so competitive, he would grab three or four pieces of cabbage instead of one. The real marvel was how this reward scheme changed his overall attitude to eating. "Now I'm someone who tries new things," he said at supper one day, asking to be given boiled egg and soldiers. OK, so he still shuddered at the yolky toast, but at least he tried it. It feels as if we might be edging towards that happy situation where good food becomes its own reward.