If you’ve ever felt worried about your vegan child’s weight or overall growth, you’re not alone.
Many vegan moms just like yourself often reach out to me feeling stressed and lost on what to feed their child to gain weight.
Majority of the time, you feel guilt and at fault for thinking that you’re not doing your best. You begin to question if you’re doing enough to support your child’s weight on a vegan diet. More than anything, you just want support in knowing what exactly to feed your vegan children.
As a vegan mom myself, I understand how important it is to ensure you offer the appropriate foods and portion sizes to your vegan kids, especially during periods of rapid growth. While it’s typical to feel responsible, how your child is growing isn’t a true reflection of who you are as mother, it’s likely just a need for a bit of change in your meal planning and feeding approach.
Meal Planning for Vegan Kids
You see, a child’s weight and overall growth is impacted by so many factors and diet is just one piece of that puzzle. The key to planning meals for our vegan kids is to ensure that vegan meals are appropriately planned. This means that you include plant foods in your meal planning that meet calorie and fat needs to support your child’s weight on a vegan diet.
Calories and fat are two essential nutrients our kids need to grow strong and healthy on a vegan diet. We dive into more detail about these key nutrients inside the Vegan Kids Nutrition Blueprint course.
I put together a short video outlining my top 4 foundational plant foods for vegan children so that their diet supports a proper weight and development.
I know how important it is to you to make sure that your child is getting everything they need from a vegan diet. After all, I’m a vegan parent just like yourself. So, when you tell me that you recently found out at a visit to your pediatrician's office that your vegan baby, toddler, and/or child isn’t meeting their weight trend, I can only imagine how overwhelming that must feel.
To find out that your vegan child was in the 50th percentile but now dropped well below that is not an easy thing to hear—let alone accept. Of course that would feel concerning!
And while your feelings are valid, I want you to know that there is something you can do about that to make sure that your son or daughter is growing healthy on a vegan diet.
While your meal planning is important to ensure proper growth, it’s not the only factor that impacts growth and development. Many times kids who experience a drop in their growth is due to other difficulties in their eating or environment, like having sensory eating challenges or extreme picky eating.
Feeding Kids a Healthful Vegan Diet
I’m going to leave you here with one thing to always remind yourself so that you move away from feeling concerned about your child’s weight to feeling confident supporting a proper growth.
I can meet my child’s nutritional needs. A vegan diet is more than adequate to meet your child’s nutrient needs. You just need to learn what foods help meet those nutritional requirements for vegan children, especially during periods of rapid growth. And when you learn what these foods are, you’ll feel more confident about meal planning knowing that you are following the best approach for your child to grow strong and healthy.
Ready to meal plan successfully? Grab my Vegan Kids Cookbook. It includes simple recipes that help meet your vegan baby, toddler, and child’s nutritional needs. It also includes a 3-Day Vegan Kids Meal Plan (one for each stage of growth) so that you have a plan for what to feed your child and feel confident about supporting their growth.
