Many children refuse to eat vegetables, so learning ways to introduce new foods will reduce the food fights and assure better eating habits for the long term.While your kids refusal to eat what's served to them may exhaust your patience and frustrate your inner mothering, rest assured, deception will not foster or instill lifelong good healthy eating habits, reports Debra Haire-Joshu, Ph.D., a professor at St. Louis University. She suggests offering fruit for snacks and vegetables as part of the meal to foster healthy eating habits.