One of the biggest drivers for vegan parents and caregivers just like you is making sure you’re providing everything your kids need to meet their nutritional needs on a vegan diet.
Through your vegan feeding journey—whether you’re just starting out or have been doing this for awhile—you may encounter some challenges, doubts, or uncertainties in knowing how to support your vegan child’s or vegan teen’s growth and development.
You may already know that raising vegan kids is safe. And that a vegan diet is nutritionally adequate to support your child’s growth. But despite being certain about this, sometimes thoughts come up that make you feel unsure, such as:
“Am I doing enough?”
“Am I missing a nutrient?”
“What serving size is best for my vegan baby or child?”
All of these questions are normal. In fact, I’ve encountered many of these myself as a vegan pediatric dietitian along my own feeding journey in raising two vegan daughters. Not because I didn’t know about nutrition but because it’s an experience that was once new to me as a newly parent.
In this blog post, I want to share with you my top tips for feeding your vegan kids and vegan teens that I personally follow in my feeding journey (and share with my clients) to help you feel confident along your journey.
Tips for Feeding Vegan kids & Vegan teens
1.Take it one meal at a time
This one may not be super obvious but here’s why I’m making this the first tip.
Many times when I work with parents, the thought of meeting their vegan child’s nutritional needs feels very daunting and overwhelming—especially for new vegan parents. You feel like you have to get every nutrient, plant-food, and everything about meal planning “right” to ensure you’re on the right path. And while I believe you can certainly do that, I want you to know that it’s OK to go gradual on this.
Imagine each nutrient-packed meal as a foundational brick, contributing to the construction of your vegan child's growth and development. Instead of viewing your child's nutrition as constructing a house, consider approaching it meal by meal, or more specifically, one brick at a time.
When you take a step back and focus on individual meals or even specific foods, you can lessen the overwhelm of making sure you're providing everything your child needs.
This approach allows you to concentrate on the immediate nutritional needs in a more manageable and less daunting manner.
The foundation is something I go into more detail inside the Vegan Kids Nutrition Blueprint course.
2. Focus on providing high-calorie plant foods
Supporting a child’s growth and development involves providing adequate nutrition. The foundation of adequate nutrition for growing kids is meeting calorie needs.
I often see vegan parents focusing their meal planning around fruits and vegetables. And while these are important to ensure we provide them in our kids' plant-based diet, they aren’t the most important food groups to focus on during periods of rapid growth and development (i.e. early childhood and adolescence).
Meeting calorie needs should be the focus during early childhood and periods where vegan kids are rapidly growing because it’s what fuels brain development and overall growth.
Focus on providing plant-based foods like nut/seed butters, tofu, and fortified plant-milks or plant yogurts. I share more about how and why meeting calorie needs for vegan kids is important over on Taylor Wolfram’s blog.
3. Be mindful about dietary fiber for young children
Plant-based foods are rich in fiber. Naturally, kids and teens who eat a plant-based diet tend to have pretty adequate intakes of fiber.
While fiber is needed and great for overall health, “too much” of it can impact meeting their nutrient needs, especially during early childhood. This is because young children have a small stomach and fiber can make them feel full quicker since fiber is slower to digest.
If kids get full from high-fiber plant foods, their intake may be less and potentially fall short in meeting their nutritional needs. This in turn can potentially impact their overall growth and development.
One way to help is by offering low-fiber plant-based foods by incorporating refined grains like white rice, starchy vegetables like potatoes, and fruits like canned fruit, bananas, and melons. This doesn’t have to be an everyday thing. Like I said, fiber is important and providing a variety of plant-based foods is helpful on so many levels for growing plant-based kids, just be mindful about how much fiber is provided throughout the day.
For older vegan kids and teens, high-fiber foods become less of a concern unless they are having growth challenges like not meeting calories or are underweight.
4. Prioritize calcium-rich plant foods
Meeting calcium needs is particularly important for young vegan children and vegan teens as this is a time where their calcium needs increase.
In fact, research has shown that kids often fall short in meeting their calcium requirements—regardless of their dietary pattern. One of the simplest ways to ensure calcium needs are met for your vegan kids is to provide a calcium-fortified plant milk like soy milk or pea milk. If your child doesn’t drink plant milk, you can still incorporate a calcium-fortified plant milk in baked goods like pancakes, chia pudding, or smoothies.
5. Offer balanced plant-based snacks
When you think of snacks for your vegan kids, think of snacks as another opportunity throughout the day to meet nutritional needs. For that reason, I encourage you to provide at least two different food groups so that it’s not only balanced to help curb your child’s hunger but also meet different vitamins and minerals from different plant food sources.
Here are some examples:
Edamame + apple
Crackers + hummus
Cereal + plant-yogurt
Trail mix + berries
Muffing + nut butter
6. Ensure adequate supplements for vegan kids
Supporting your vegan child’s growth through childhood involves providing adequate supplements. There are certain key nutrients that require a supplement for vegan kids, such as Vitamin D, Vitamin B12, iodine, iron, and DHA. Each of these require different dosages per your child’s age and begin at different stages of growth. No matter how old your vegan child or vegan teen is, it’s still important to ensure that they receive the appropriate supplements to prevent any deficiency.
Click here to grab my FREE Supplement Checklist for vegan kids. It outlines the supplements for vegan kids and also when to begin offering them to your child.
7. Trust your child’s appetite rather than focusing on portion sizes
Many times as parents we feel that our kids may miss certain nutrients when we perceive their intake as not “enough”. We feel unsure about what portion sizes vegan kids should have for their age. This is a very normal and valid experience for parents, myself included.
While serving sizes are helpful to reference, it’s important to note that they don’t dictate the precise amount your vegan child should consume during any particular meal. Instead, I encourage you to view portion sizes as a starting point. Begin with a small amount and serve more based on your child’s interest, rather than seeing serving sizes a fixed amount your child “should” have.
So, plate a very small portion and offer more if your child requests for more. This approach allows your child to regulate their own intake and help you learn what your vegan child’s usual intake is.
If your child is older or you have a teen that can plate their own food, respect the amount they chose to serve themselves—even if you perceive that amount to be “too large” or “too little”.
When you trust your child’s appetite, it directly supports their growth. They are their own person and know best about their hunger cues.
8. Foster a positive feeding environment
When you create and foster a positive feeding environment, you directly support your child’s growth and development.
This can be done by doing the following:
Respecting your child’s desire to eat a food
Trusting your child’s appetite—regardless of their age
Role model eating behavior—children absorb everything around them and mimic eating behaviors
Ensure proper seating for your child—one where their feet is supported
Comment on facts or observations about food rather than labeling food
Limit distractions like turning off music and/or screens
9. Offer variety and flexibility
Offering a variety of plant-based foods to your kids ensures a greater opportunity to meet nutritional needs but also opportunity to become familiar to different foods, flavors, and textures. If they reject a plant-based food, that’s okay. Kids learn to try foods on their own time. As long as you foster a positive eating environment, your vegan child will want to try a plant food when they are ready to do so. All you have to do, is continue to offer it from time to time. It can take 10, 20, even 50+ times for your child to be exposed to it before they decide to try it. Allow your vegan child to explore foods in their own way and at their own pace, without the need to pressure or encouraging them to eat it. And know that if they touch by moving that food from their plate, lick, or even bring it close to their mouth—all of these count as exposure!
Grab the FREE Essential Starter Kit
Learn the simple roadmap to support your vegan child’s growth and development with this FREE Essential Starter Kit for Vegan Kids
