VegMoms

Raising a vegan or vegetarian child? For kid-friendly vegan recipes, health news, inspiration and more check out my new site for VegMoms: http://bit.ly/cJuKC5

Wednesday’s Vegan Kids: It’s easy to let too much salt creep into our kids’ daily diets without even noticing. Too much salt can contribute to high blood pressure and obesity, even in childhood. But more than that, kids who eat a high sodium diet may expect all food to taste unnaturally highly flavored, thereby predisposing them to want all the foods that are high in salt (like fast food, chips and other junk foods) and to dislike milder flavored, natural foods like whole grains, fruits and veggies.

Here are some simple ways to help your child avoid salt:

1. When you cook, use low-sodium veggie stock and low-sodium soy sauce.
2. Rinse canned beans, and cook with dried beans as much as possible.
3. Buy natural, no salt added peanut butter.
4. Choose low-sodium canned soups.
5. Eliminate potato chips and other salty snacks from your child’s daily food choices.

When you do use salt, choose iodized salt because iodine is essential to your child’s health. Salt doesn’t have to be a complete no-no for kids — let’s be real, we all like some salty popcorn or a shake or two on some steamed veggies every now and again.  Just be aware that too much of a good thing like salt can shake our children’s health and, with all of the low-sodium products on the market today, it’s an easy hazard to avoid.

Blog post adapted from The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Vegan Eating for Kids. (Photo: iStockphoto.com)

Wednesday’s Vegan Kids: My family and I just finished watching the strangely sweet documentary Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill. It’s about a flock of escapee parrots in San Francisco and the eccentric man who has befriended them. There’s a similar flock of roving parrots in the Florida metro area where we live and it was fun to hear about another community that has a similar once-caught-now-free flock. What I found most fascinating in the movie, however, was watching the baby-and-parent bird interactions. When the parent bird flies back to the baby sitting on a branch with food, the parents literally shove food down the baby’s throat, beak to beak. We hope human parents aren’t quite that aggressive about making their kids eat healthy food, but it is illustrative that most animal kids eat only what the parents eat. No special baby food here.

In one scene, a parrot parent continually pushes its baby back into its nest. Eccentric Bird Guy explained that he has observed this behavior many times, and that the baby bird only flies out of the nest when it’s strong enough to push past its parents’ blockade and fly away. I told my own little chicks that this is how it works in the people world, too. Kids have to build up their own physical, mental and moral muscle before we let them fly away and make decisions fully on their own. Thankfully, I’m still stronger because I’m not ready for any of them to leave the nest yet.  

Wednesday’s Veg Kids: Do you have a vegetarian or vegan kid who hates most vegetables? Sounds like an unmanageable paradox, but I’m here to tell you it’s not. I have one daughter who loves all veggies and fruits. All of them. I have another who is strictly the most-common-fruits-and-veggies-only type: Give her anything but bananas, apples, grapes, carrots, peas and corn, and I’m out of luck. This can be worrisome, especially on days when I’m serving meals made up of other fun, more daring foods like mango or pineapple, or even the dreaded broccoli. Those kind of days are when Voots come in handy. Sure, I’d rather have her eat her full servings of organic, raw produce every day of her life from age 2 to 18, but let’s get real. Sometimes, certain kids just don’t do that, and certain weeks are more survival by any means necessary in the family nutrition department than others. That’s, again, when Voots will come in handy for many families like ours. They contain no refined sugar, yet they disguise a cropful of fruits and veggies (including prunes, raspberries, zucchini and green beans) into chewable sweet tart-like candy and provide 3 servings of fruits and veggies in two little tarts. Can you believe that? Neither can my daughter, which is why she loves them!

Wednesday Vegan Kids … If your child declares herself vegan or vegetarian and you are carnivorous, would you support her choice? What about if you’re vegan and your child decides he wants to eat meat? Do you let him? Do you buy meat for him? These are the questions many parents on both the meat no-meat side of the equation find themselves grappling, as more kids want to go meatless, or as more parents want their families to live a veg life but may have kids who are resistant to that idea.

I discuss this sticky situation in depth in my soon-to-be released book The Complete Idiots Guide to Vegan Eating for Kids. But what’s most important to remember is whatever you choose, it’s up to you as the parent to set the tone. We can make any kind of eating a power struggle between us and our children, or an opportunity to present our beliefs in a positive way and allow them to make more choices about their own lives, especially as they grow. “May your life preach more loudly than your lips,” a popular paraphrase of St. Francis of Assisi fits well here. We can guide our children along the paths we believe are right, and they may follow in our footsteps. But I believe they have to take their own steps and make their own imprints in the world to know what path is truly right for them. I can hope they’ll follow, but I can’t walk it for them.