Transcript Episode 9: The Most Important Thing to Implement and Help Vegan Kids Try Plant Foods
Karla Moreno-Bryce: Toilet training my daughter at the age of 18 months was a journey that I didn’t anticipate, let alone desire for any other family. As a first time mom, I had insight from my own mother on ways to toilet train my daughter, but despite hearing her experience and reading online about how other parents navigated this milestone, I still wasn’t quite sure what the best path was for me and my daughter. Yet, I felt pressured to begin our journey.
With friends having kids of similar age as my daughter and already fully toilet trained and with my daughter starting Montessori school in just a few months, I felt the need to get her ready. I felt this uncomfortable pressure of getting her prepared because I felt influenced that that was where she needed to be.
I remember buying her these cotton reusable toilet training underwear that had some sort of padding in case she peed on herself. And I started by introducing her to these underwear during the day, talking to her about why we were making the change and letting her know that if her body needed to use the toilet, she could tell me and we can go together.
And I feel that she understood what all of that meant. She was starting to get the idea of where she needed to be in order to use the toilet. But the more and more she peed on her underwear, the more anxious I started to get. And the more anxiety she sensed from me, the more she started to peed on her underwear. My own attitude and mood around the fact that she was peeing on herself really impacted her.
And just looking back at that time makes me feel a bit emotional and incredibly ashamed to be honest because I realized too late that I was making toilet training my agenda. Which by the way, I don’t like the word toilet training but that’s a whole discussion of its own. I dislike how I approach this time because I just wanted her to do it on my terms. I wanted her to be ready when she herself was clearly not ready.
And I’m sharing this vulnerable and very personal experience with you because it mirrors something similar to when we want our vegan kids to try and eat certain plant foods like vegetables. So, in today’s episode, I’ll be sharing with you the single most important thing you can do to help your kids try plant foods. Whether your vegan child is selective with their food or simply helping your vegan toddler like the foods they once used to like.
Often times when I work with vegan parents, I get asked about how to get their vegan child to eat certain plant foods or how to make their children taste and love green vegetables. These are valid desires. I mean, we know how nutrient dense these foods are that can help our vegan kids meet their nutrient needs. And after time and time again seeing our vegan kids not try certain foods, these experiences can lead us to feel frustrated and incredibly overwhelmed at how to feed our vegan kids. Maybe this resonates with you? We naturally try to do everything in our power to just get them to try vegetables or other types of plant based foods.
I get that feeding our vegan kids is hard work and it becomes even more of a challenge when they don’t want to try or eat something on their plate. Our thoughts and emotions may make us feel anxious not only on what to prepare for a meal so that they eat something but also during the meal wondering if they’ll eat enough.
Now before I share with you what you can do at home to not only help your vegan child try plant foods but also help you feel more at ease around meal times, I first want to acknowledge how our feelings or actions at the dinner table affect our kids. Children are very sensitive to the underlying messages in our actions despite being unintentional on our part.
One of the things that I love about children is their ability to want to do things on their own. From a very young age, they have this innate desire to do things on their own. They want to know how things work, where things go, why things happen a certain way. They’re curious creatures.
However, at times, we as parents unintentionally prevent them from having this independence—and I say this from personal experience. From not allowing them to joyfully be content to want to experiment on their own. We believe that through our actions in showing our kids how to put the triangle in the triangle cut out if they happen to be playing with a toy or how to hold the spoon correctly from the handle rather than the concave part or how much they should eat to meet their nutritional requirements, we do this because we want to help. At our core we want what’s best for our kids.
But when we intervene in some way or another to show them how things are done correctly or to our own standards so to speak, we prevent them from having that independence they crave. The independence to try things on their own, to learn about their capabilities, to have control over their own body.
When we intervene, our vegan kids feel like something isn’t right here. Even though our words or actions are well-meaning, what we convey to our vegan kids is that their abilities, hesitations or feelings are wrong.
So, what should we do instead? Well, through my learning about childhood development and also as a vegan feeding expert, the most important thing we can do for our vegan kids is to let them lead. Allow them to lead in how they want to explore with a toy. To lead in however they choose to engage with their meal or feeding utensils. To lead in however much they choose to eat from their plate.
Our vegan kids will want to try that broccoli or green peas on their plate when they feel ready to do so. As long as they continue to have multiple exposures to this particular plant food, there will come a time where they will feel ready to want to try that plant food. And believe me, this requires a lot of patience on our end. It’s something I too had to learn when my daughter was still learning to like and to want to try lentils—a plant food that took her 2 years to want to try.
When I made toilet training my own agenda for my daughter, I didn’t allow her to lead. She wasn’t ready to move away from diapers just yet and I certainly didn’t allow her the choice to take control of her body.
I had to remind myself that my daughter was the one in control of her own body and that meant that she gets to decide when she’s ready. I remember frequently inviting her to the bathroom especially when we were going to be out of the home but this frequency and constant reminder led her to show some resistance.
And very similarly resistance is something we see with kids not wanting to try their vegetables. They show resistance by saying no, throwing a tantrum, or even pushing push away because either emotionally or verbally we tell them what to do. However, when we step back and allow space for them to take the lead as to when and how much they want to try that plant food, something magical happens.
Our vegan kids feel a sense of relief and an opportunity to actually want to try that plant food because they feel trusted from being allowed to lead in their own food choices at the dining table. And the more trusted they feel, the more they’ll feel comfortable to want to try that plant food on their own. And the more comfortable they feel, the more ready they are to do so. They feel ready.
Many of you may disagree with this approach and that’s okay. At the end of the day, you do what feels right and what’s important for your family. But if there’s anything that you take from today’s episode is to not do the same mistake that I did and that is to not trust your child. I didn’t trust my daughter to learn or be ready to toilet train on her own and that has caused incredible mishaps through our time in using the toilet. But once I applied this trust and allowed her to lead when she needed to use the toilet, things sort of fell into place. And using the toilet became so much easier. It’s not perfect but it’s easier.
And I’ve applied this same approach in our feeding journey too. Trusting her to try plant foods when she’s ready has allowed her to explore and to learn to like a variety of foods. A simple phrase that I said to my daughter when she was hesitant to try lentils, which by the way has been the biggest challenge in getting her to try, is “You don’t have to eat them if you don’t want to. I know you’ll try them when you’re ready”. That simple phrase conveyed that I trusted my daughter, that she was safe around these foods, and that she wasn’t pressured to do something she wasn’t ready to do.
It requires a lot from us to navigate picky eating with our vegan kids. But I’m confident that when you show trust and when you lessen your expectations at the dining table, your vegan child will feel a sense of comfort and with time, will feel ready to try and eat that plant food they were so hesitant to try. All you have to do is let them lead.
If you’re looking for more insight and guidance on how to support your vegan picky eater, grab my FREE picky eating guide that walks you through my top 5 strategies that help kids from being hesitant to want to try plant foods to learning to like them and broaden their food acceptance. You can grab your copy with the link in the show notes.
Alright my friends, I hope that today’s episode left you feeling hopeful that you can turn things around and help your selective eater try more plant foods. I can’t wait to hear how things go for you. I’ll see you in the next episode. Bye for now.