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But from time to time, legitimate food battles must be fought—or at least negotiated. Parents need to find ways to guide children who consistently refuse to eat fruits, veggies, and whole grains onto a different path. To be healthy, all children must include those important food groups in their diets (or at least learn how to sneak them into food; see Chapter 9 for that) to some extent.

Parents also need to ensure their child is eating enough calories and nutrients, and practicing other basic self-care measures such as getting enough exercise and sleep. Guard your child’s growth, health, behavior, mood, and ability to learn by setting up your home’s food environment for the best choices possible, by being active in sports or other outdoor activities together, and by being aware of your child’s sleep schedule.

Common Eating Challenges for Kids

In Chapter 3, we talked about strategies for working with the picky eater. Now let’s dig further into other common kid eating quirks and offer some solutions. But first, be reminded: the best protection for a vegan child going through strange eating phases of any sort is including a daily multivitamin or fortified vegan foods in her daily diet, especially for vitamins B12 and D, as well as zinc, iron, riboflavin, DHA (docosahexaenoic acid), and calcium.

The following sections outline some common eating quirks and ways to quell them.

The Carb Queen

This child eats pasta, bread, crackers, rice, tortillas, and cereal in abundance but turns up her nose at nearly anything else—even anything on, in, or over those beloved carbs.

Solutions: Begin to put small amounts of healthful toppings, spreads, and vegetables on or in her favorite carb-based meals—and we mean small (barely noticeable) amounts: vegan Parmesan on the pasta, a few kernels of cooked frozen corn and carrots mixed into the rice, less than a spoonful of hummus on the tortilla. When you find a few that she’ll eat, begin to add more of those. Then expand to other healthful additions such as tomato sauce on the pasta (again, lightly at first), small tofu chunks in the rice, or a couple bananas or strawberries cut in half on her cereal. Advance incrementally.

Because most carbs are rather blandly colored, color may be one of your child’s hindrances, so first go with the simply colored fruits and veggies such as peeled apples, bananas, celery, corn—nothing outlandishly purple or, heaven forbid, green! Build up to those challenges.

Parent Trap

Simply do not introduce white bread to your child. The taste- and texture-stunting nature of bleached, white bread turns kids away from whole grains like nothing else. White bread is fortified, but the lack of natural nutrients and texture makes this a no-go food. It can be difficult to find whole-grain bread that doesn’t contain dairy, so you might want to consider investing in a bread maker and making your own. Get your kids involved, too, if they’re old enough.

Sugar Is King

Some kids want to eat dessert before, during, and after meals, but not just for the sweet taste. Anything with simple sugar gives them an immediate brain hit. They don’t recognize it, but sugar can become like a mini-addiction for kids whose brains are sensitive to it. This is one of the trickiest vegan kid food issues to handle because so many great vegan desserts, candy, and treats are relatively healthful when compared with nonvegan desserts. But vegan sweets still must be consumed in moderation or limited for kids with sugar-sensitive brains.

Solutions: If your child has been a sugar hound for a while, you may need to retrain her taste buds by eliminating all foods containing simple, refined sugars for a while, until things like grapes and strawberries taste plenty sweet enough. Then, most candies, cookies, and even too much of a healthful sweet such as large portions of dried fruit or vegan brownies at breakfast seem unpalatable to them.

Vegan Voices

A great Halloween idea: When our child was two we