The Complete Idiot's Guide to Vegan Eating for Kids - M.s.j., Dana Villamagna [40]
You’ve watched her grow and develop her unique food preferences, so now’s the time to capitalize on all that groundwork and have some fun with the wide array of healthy veg foods and recipes you can continue to introduce to her!
Sample Meal Plan for Vegan Kids (4 to 8 Years)
Note: The starred servings also count as servings from the other groups at the same time. They aren’t additional. The items in the Starred food items category are the foods you want your kid to consume because they’re high in calcium. Serving sizes vary depending on the child’s age.
The calorie content of the diet can be increased by greater amounts of nut butters, dried fruits, soy products, and other high-calorie foods.
A regular source of vitamin B12-fortified nutritional yeast, vitamin B12-fortified soy milk, vitamin B12-fortified breakfast cereal, vitamin B12-fortified meat analogs, or vitamin B12 supplements should be used.
The Least You Need to Know
◆ Prepare your child to begin making many of her own food choices by educating her about where foods come from and her nutritional needs.
◆ Pick your food battles, let many phases simply blow over, but insist that she meet her most important nutritional needs and find creative ways to help her do so. Even if your child isn’t a naturally picky eater, kids often go through phases of strange eating habits.
◆ If your child aged 4 to 8 is just beginning to adopt a vegan diet, expect a time of transition. Start with the animal-based foods that are the least painful to give up or substitute with a plant-based alternative and ease into eliminating her animal-based favorites over time.
◆ Calcium, zinc, iron, vitamin B12, and DHA are especially important to supplement in a vegan child’s diet with a multivitamin and/ or enriched foods.
Chapter 8
Vegan Tweens (9 to 13 Years)
In This Chapter
◆ Growing like a tween
◆ What they watch impacts what they eat
◆ Tweens’ increased nutrition needs
◆ A tween-appropriate meal plan
As your child progresses into the tween years, she’ll begin to ask more sophisticated questions about everything—including your family’s food choices. And she will likely point out any hypocrisies she notices in life—including yours.
On the flip side, as quickly as her hormones seem to change, a tween may change her mind about veganism like the wind changes direction, one day confident about your family’s way of eating, the next day wondering if being different is worth the hassles. It’s no wonder that one tween parenting book, Julie Ross’s How to Hug a Porcupine, compares tweens to those quill-filled creatures. The myriad changes both boys and, even more acutely, girls begin to experience at this age add up to prickly moods, changing opinions, and skepticism about parents’ ways of doing things.
In this chapter, we talk about what’s happening to your tween’s body at this stage and what you can do to nutritionally support those changes. You discover how your child’s food choices are influenced by advertising and product placement and what you can do to counter that. As her parent, the balancing act of the tween years includes helping your child become confident in your family’s way of eating and, at the same time, allowing her to question it and grow into her own views on veganism.
The Big Growth Spurt
Contrary to popular belief, the hormonal changes of puberty don’t wait for the teen years. In fact, the female body begins to kick into hormone-changing gear as young as 7 or 8. So while the word tween may be a marketers’ ploy to get younger kids to start acting—and buying—like teenagers, it can be a good term to help parents identify this unique stage of growth and development. Long before she hits 13 (many parents really begin to notice this around age 9 or 10), your child has already undergone some major physical changes that separate her from younger children, even though