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Does your kid hate beans?
Maybe they won’t touch a black bean on their taco. They pick every chickpea out of their pasta salad. Or they took one bite of a kidney bean three years ago, hated the texture, and have been firmly anti-bean ever since.
As a pediatric registered dietitian and mom, I get it. Beans can be a tricky food for kids, especially because of their unique texture. Personally, I was that kid who picked all their beans out of the chili.
But they’re also one of those foods that I think are worth continuing to offer.
Beans are affordable, versatile, packed with nutrients, and incredibly easy to add to foods your family is already eating. And your child doesn’t have to sit down and eat a giant pile of beans for them to learn to like them.
In fact, if your child doesn’t like beans right now, my first recommendation isn’t necessarily to find the perfect bean recipe.
Instead, try changing the way they experience them.
Let’s talk about the benefits of beans for kids and 10 low-pressure ways to help your child become more comfortable with them.
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Are Beans Good for Kids? Benefits of Beans for Kids
Beans don’t always get the same attention as some of the trendier “superfoods,” but they’re doing a whole lot of nutritional heavy lifting.
The benefits of beans for kids is quite robust. Beans can be a nutritious addition to kids’ diets because they provide fiber, plant-based protein, iron, folate, potassium and other important nutrients. They’re also affordable, versatile, and easy to incorporate into many family meals.
Beans, lentils, chickpeas and other pulses can provide kids with nutrients including:
- Fiber
- Plant-based protein
- Iron
- Folate
- Potassium
- Magnesium
I’m especially excited about the fiber because the majority of Americans are not getting enough.
Fiber is important for digestive health and can help support regular bowel movements and overall gut health. Yet many kids don’t get enough fiber in their diets.
Beans are one simple way to add more.
And while beans contain plant-based protein, they don’t need to replace meat or other animal proteins to be beneficial. I’m a big believer in nutrition by addition.
That might mean adding black beans to a taco made with ground beef, throwing chickpeas into a pasta salad or adding lentils to a meat sauce.
It doesn’t have to be one or the other.
But What If My Kid Hates Beans?
First, you don’t need to panic about getting your child to eat beans.
The benefits of beans for kids is impressive, but they’re not a magical food your child has to eat. There are plenty of other foods that provide the nutrients found in beans.
At the same time, not liking beans today doesn’t mean your child will never like them.
One thing I often encourage parents to think about with picky eating is the sensory experience of a food.
Think about beans for a second.
They’re often soft. Sometimes they’re mushy. They can have a skin that feels different from the inside. Different varieties are different sizes, colors and textures.
That’s a LOT happening in one tiny food.
Instead of repeatedly putting the same scoop of beans on your child’s plate and hoping that one day they’ll magically decide they love them, experiment with how you serve them.
Here are 10 ways to do exactly that.
10 Ways to Help Kids Learn to Like Beans
1. Change the Texture
If your child says they don’t like beans, get curious about what they don’t like.
Is it the flavor? Or could it be the texture?
A whole chickpea, creamy hummus, mashed refried beans and a crispy roasted chickpea are technically providing a similar food experience nutritionally, but they feel completely different in your mouth.
Instead of deciding “my kid doesn’t like beans,” try offering beans in different textures and see what happens.
2. Make Them Crispy
If mushy foods are difficult for your child, crispy beans can be a completely different experience.
Try roasting chickpeas until crispy or adding crispy chickpeas to a snack plate alongside foods your child already enjoys. You can also purchase roasted chickpeas from the store.
You don’t need to convince them to take a bite. Let them explore the new texture at their own pace.
3. Mash Them
Take the texture in the opposite direction and mash them.
Refried beans are an easy option, or you can lightly mash black or pinto beans and add them to a quesadilla or spread them onto a tortilla.
Your child is still being exposed to beans, just in a different form.
4. Turn Them Into a Dip
Some kids who won’t touch a chickpea will happily eat hummus.
And that’s okay!
Try hummus, white bean dip, black bean dip or another bean-based dip alongside a familiar dipping food.
If your child only dips the very corner of their cracker into it? That still counts as an experience with the food. Or heck, ask them to dip a chip and feed it to you to help them engage with the beans.
5. Experiment With Different Sizes and Shapes
Not all beans are the same.
A tiny lentil is a completely different sensory experience from a black bean, chickpea or giant butter bean.
Experiment with different varieties rather than assuming that because your child doesn’t like one type of bean, they don’t like any beans.
You might even put a few different varieties out and let your child compare them.
Which is the biggest? Smallest? Softest? Funniest looking?
Taking the pressure off eating and simply getting curious about food can help kids become more comfortable around it.
6. Try Them Hot, Cold and Room Temperature
Temperature changes the sensory experience, too.
Your child might not like warm black beans alongside their tacos but might tolerate chilled black beans in a corn salsa.
Chickpeas can be served warm, cold or crispy.
Experiment. There’s no rule saying there’s one “right” way to serve beans.
7. Pair Beans With Something Familiar
New or less-preferred foods can feel more approachable when they’re served alongside foods your child already knows and enjoys.
Try a few black beans alongside a quesadilla.
Serve hummus with a favorite cracker.
Add black beans to your brownies to make black bean brownies.
This isn’t about bribing your child to eat the beans or sneaking them into something they love. You’re simply giving them a familiar food alongside a less-familiar one.
8. Let Them Interact Without Requiring Them to Eat
This one is BIG.
Exposure doesn’t have to mean taking a bite.
Your child can:
- Scoop beans onto their taco
- Mash them with a fork
- Dip a chip into bean dip
- Help rinse canned beans
- Add chickpeas to a salad
- Stir lentils into a sauce
- Sort different beans by color or size
- Glue dried beans onto paper to make shapes
They might lick the hummus off a cracker. They might touch a bean and decide they’re done.
That’s okay.
Getting comfortable with food can happen before eating it.
9. Add Beans Instead of Replacing Foods
You don’t need to turn every meal into a plant-based meal to eat more beans.
This is where nutrition by addition can be really helpful.
Instead of replacing all the ground beef in your tacos with lentils, try adding some lentils to the ground beef. I love getting canned lentils from Trader Joe’s to add to taco meat, spaghetti sauce, or sloppy joes.
Add black beans to cheesy nachos.
Add white beans to pasta.
Add chickpeas to a familiar salad.
Add beans alongside rice and chicken in a burrito bowl.
We’re adding another nutritious food to the meal, not taking away something your child already enjoys.
10. Keep Serving Beans as Beans
Yes, beans for kids can be blended, mashed and transformed into all sorts of things.
But they can also just be…beans.
You don’t need to hide black beans in brownies or disguise every chickpea your child encounters.
Occasionally put a few recognizable beans on their plate alongside other foods without requiring them to eat them. I love placing just one bean on a toothpick or food pick and placing it on their plate. Who knows, maybe they’ll simply pick it up, and even that is positive engagement.
Maybe they ignore them.
Maybe they touch one.
Maybe they eventually take a bite.
And maybe one day they decide they’re actually pretty good.
Food acceptance doesn’t always happen quickly.
Your Child Doesn’t Have to Eat Beans for the Exposure to Count
One of the biggest mistakes we can make when introducing a less-preferred food is deciding the only successful outcome is eating it.
It isn’t.
Your child might need time to get comfortable with how beans look, smell and feel before they’re ready to eat them.
And even when they do taste them, they might not like them yet.
Keep the pressure low.
Continue serving familiar foods alongside them.
Let your child explore.
And remember that you don’t need to get your child to eat a specific amount of beans for the experience to be worthwhile.
Canned Beans Count, Too
And before you leave thinking you need to start soaking dried beans overnight, please don’t make this harder than it needs to be.
I use canned beans all the time. I actually rarely use dried beans.
They’re convenient, relatively inexpensive, have a long shelf life and make it incredibly easy to add beans to meals.
Drain them. Rinse them if you’d like. Add them to whatever you’re making.
Nutrition doesn’t get bonus points for being more complicated.
The Bottom Line on Beans for Kids
The benefits of beans for kids are impressive. They’re an affordable and versatile source of fiber, plant-based protein, iron, folate and other important nutrients.
But knowing beans are nutritious doesn’t magically make your child want to eat them.
If your child doesn’t like beans, instead of focusing on getting them to eat more, focus on giving them opportunities to experience beans in different ways.
Make them crispy. Mash them. Blend them. Serve them hot or cold. Try different varieties. Pair them with familiar foods. Let your child interact with them without requiring a bite.
And keep some recognizable beans around, too.
Your job isn’t to convince your child to love beans. It’s to give them plenty of low-pressure opportunities to learn about them.
And sometimes that starts with simply letting a bean hang out on their plate.
