The Complete Idiot's Guide to Vegan Eating for Kids - M.s.j., Dana Villamagna [34]
◆ Wean a bottle-fed toddler to a cup as early as possible. Limit the amount of juice given via bottle or cup.
◆ Feeding your toddler nutritious, healthful foods now helps your child develop a taste for the good stuff.
Chapter 7
Vegan Kids (4 to 8 Years)
In This Chapter
◆ Pick your food battles wisely
◆ Tips for dealing with eating challenges
◆ Meeting vegan kids’ nutrition needs
◆ A kid-appropriate meal plan
Once kids leave behind toddlerhood, they begin to interface with the larger, nonvegan world on their own to a much greater degree. When your child is in school, at friends’ homes, or in after-school activities and sports, the ability to make her own food choices depends largely on how she feels about being vegan, how much she knows about where different foods come from, and how much she has learned (or retained) about basic nutrition.
If your family has eaten a vegan diet for as long as your child can remember, making pro-veg choices on her own will come naturally. Even so, most kids go through challenging phases and take on some strange eating habits from time to time throughout childhood. In this chapter, we talk about how to best handle those challenges.
For those parents who have recently adopted veganism and are introducing a new way of eating to your child, choosing veg foods on her own will likely be more challenging than for those families who were vegan from the start. In the following pages, we discuss ways to substitute vegan foods for animal-based products gradually, which gives your kids time to adapt.
Childhood is also the time they’ll be introduced to all sorts of new junk foods, which can be quite exciting novelties. Remember the first time you saw cotton candy, foot-long licorice, or foot-long hot dogs at the ballpark? Banning all candy, fast food, and other junk foods from your child’s diet may not be realistic. That said, you can minimize them without making her feel deprived, while still helping your child understand why junk foods should make up a tiny percentage of her food choices.
Finally, you learn the nuts and bolts nutritional needs of kids in this age group, and we encourage you to begin sharing these simple nutrition concepts with your child as young as 4 years old. Even preschoolers can begin to grasp some of the most basic ideas of why fruits and veggies, protein, carbohydrates, and natural fats are necessary to grow strong and healthy. You can teach them why it’s important to limit or avoid processed foods, foods rich in unhealthy fats and sugar, and, of course, animal-based products.
Kids who understand what’s good fuel for their bodies are laying the groundwork for developing a sense of mastery and control over what goes into their mouths. What a gift to give your child when they’re this young, and what a foundation for her to continue to build upon throughout her life!
Nutrition Negotiation
“Pick your battles carefully,” advised Dana’s mother when we first began parenting. “But once you choose to enter into one, be sure you win.” This sage advice may apply most directly to kids and food.
There are many times when entering a battle with your child over food is just plain wrong. “You must finish everything on your plate,” is one of the oldest, most erroneous parent-child food fights. It causes your child to lose her ability to recognize hunger signals and know when she’s actually hungry or full. This loss of hunger and satiety signals is a clear contributor to obesity.
Vegan Vocab
Knowing a sense of satiety—the state of being satisfied or physically full—is key to lifetime weight management. If children learn to eat even when full to “finish their plate,” or eat for fun, out of boredom, or to soothe anxiety, it can lead to disordered eating and obesity.
Other times, food battles are futile. Expecting your child to eat a perfectly balanced diet every day, or believing that she will always forgo