Lauren is a stay-at-home mother of two in Fairfield, Connecticut, who is deeply devoted to her family’s well-being. She has a great down-to-earth perspective on things, but her family’s health is something she just can’t be casual about.

Her kids had no problem eating vegetables when they were babies, but like most kids, everything changed when they hit the toddler years; getting them to eat their greens became a battle she wasn’t winning.

“Kids always look up to their parents and mimic their behavior,” Lauren explains. “It didn’t take long to realize that my problem was I needed to get Dad on board, too.” One evening during a family meal, she noticed how her husband had been pushing his peas off to the side in favor of his main dish—and how her kids had been doing the same, watching him. She realized that maybe all it would take to get them to change their eating habits would be a slight change of behavior from her husband.

The next night, after Lauren and her husband talked privately and agreed to setting better examples for their children, her husband made sure her to complement Lauren in front of the kids with how she prepared the peas; he ate every one. Hearing this, her son and daughter quickly joined in the praise and ate more vegetables than she had seen in a while.

“Once my husband made a really strong effort to eating his vegetables at every meal, my kids did too,” she explains. The change wasn’t overnight, but to Lauren, it certainly felt like it.

It’s common knowledge that by reading to your children, they’re more likely to become avid readers themselves, and that showing good manners to others in front of them breeds more good manners too; but for some reason, as parents, we don’t often think about how our own diets affect our kids. Lauren didn’t—but now it’s the first thing that comes to mind every night at the dinner table, and the last thing she has to worry about when visiting the doctor’s office for her kids’ routine health-check visits.