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◆ Don’t eat with the TV—your kids will look to your behavior as an example.

Parent Trap

Read more about how advertisers get inside the minds of kids in these books: Consuming Kids: Protecting Our Children from the Onslaught of Marketing and Advertising by Susan Linn; Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters from Marketers’ Schemes by Sharon Lamb and Lyn Mikel Brown; and Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers by Alissa Quart.

For vegan parents, we offer these extra ad-busting tips:

◆ If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. Some fruits and veggies now place cartoon characters and other kid-friendly celebs on their packages and stickers. If your child is more likely to eat a snack pack of baby carrots with Dora the Explorer on it, buy it.

◆ Explain the art of advertising to your child. Educate yourself about the types of advertising and the methods advertisers use to prompt food cravings in people and explain them to your child in kid-friendly language.

◆ Dive into veg-positive media. Petakids.com and others have fantastic vegan celeb promos, ads for vegan foods, and even vegan merchandise like T-shirts, backpacks, stickers, and bracelets your kids can use to promote their views on eating to the world.

◆ When you and your older child see a billboard, magazine ad, or television commercial that uses an animal to promote a food product made from that animal, write a letter together to the company to express your opinion.

This stage for the vegan child will be easier if her journey into being veg-confident began much earlier than the rocky tween years, when kids become rather uncertain about everything about themselves. If your family has been vegan for a while, your tween might surprise you with how confident, outspoken, and downright activist-ish she is in her beliefs about compassionate eating. If you’ve educated her on all the environmental, health, and animal benefits; served yummy vegan food at home; and as a result, she’s seen the difference in her health and attitudes compared to meat eaters, veganism may be one of the few family beliefs she’ll stand up for throughout these years.

Perhaps no matter when they began eating vegan, but especially if your family or child is new to veganism, be prepared to ride the roller coaster of tween change!

After she moves through tweenhood and reaches the older teen years, your child will settle into her own beliefs about eating animal-based products. Like any action or belief system, the more positive reasons you can establish for your child to follow what you’ve taught, the more likely she will be to choose to stay with—or come back to—that action or belief as an adult. The same holds true for food. In the tween years, the key words are patience, positive guidance, and prepare for prickles!

Basic Nutrition for Vegan Tweens

Tween nutritional and energy demands are equaled only by the infant year’s demands, and you can help your child’s nutritional needs meet these rapid growth spurts by learning the different needs of boys and girls during this time.

Other new differences come into play during the tween years, too:

◆ Whether your tween plays sports, what sport it is, how often, and for what duration

◆ Whether your daughter has started her monthly menstruation cycle (average age for American girls is 12)

◆ If your child has any attention, mood, or learning disorders that may be exacerbated by certain foods

◆ How her specific family genetics, ethnic background, and family’s socioeconomic class is playing out in her years of puberty

Diving as deeply as necessary into these factors is beyond the scope of this book, so be sure to talk with your child’s doctor if you have any concerns if your child’s physical or mental health, growth, or lifestyle is particularly unique or worrisome in any of these areas.

Because age, weight, puberty stages, and gender difference result in such great variance during the tween years, talk to your child’s doctor about