Vegan Parenting in a Nut-Shell
As parents, It’s innately human that we all want to provide the best for our kids. Moreover, if we survey what parents desire for their child’s future worldwide, the response will be somewhat universal, i.e., health and happiness. That is the emotional beauty of parenting. Isn’t it?
Not only is a vegan diet beneficial for health, but it also builds compassion in your kids for animal welfare. That way it brings incredible environmental harmony to our planet. Regardless of your current diet and lifestyle, whether you are vegan or willing to move your family away from animal products, you must already be aware of the amazing benefits of a plant-based diet and a vegan lifestyle by now. Even then, you might wonder how to transform your kid’s diet into a 100% plant-based vegan diet.
Vegandukan has a wide range of healthy plant-based snacks, dairy-free spreads, plant milk, ice creams, chocolates, and sweets to treat your kids in a vegan way. Also, plant-based kids' protein, nutritional supplements, and vegan protein-rich energy bars are essentially beneficial for kids.
Nevertheless, vegan parenting comes with its own unique set of challenges. Speaking of which, if you have taken this path or are currently on this journey, you may have already faced questions and critiques regarding vegan parenting. Did it feel discouraging or confusing about where to turn?
Well, here are the top ten tips for raising vegan kids in a happy, healthy, compassionate, and thriving way!
Top Ten Tips on Vegan Parenting
1. Make Your Reason Clearer
Firstly, for any decision you make to alter your lifestyle, it’s important to consider your family’s values and priorities together with it. The key here is, when the “why you are doing it” is clear enough to you, the rest falls into place. Being vegan ourselves, we know that a vegan lifestyle optimizes our well-being by reducing the risk of diseases. Also, it prevents animals from being abused to become our commodities and reduces our environmental footprint in the process. Moreover, with all of the resources and recipes now available online, we can enjoy incredibly tasty meals even while living with kindness and compassion. This gives us all the reasons and the perfect values to share with our little ones!
2. Do Your Research and Plan Accordingly
Being parents, you must already know how important it is to do proper research and plan any kid’s diet accordingly. Yet, a vegan diet for kids is often highly scrutinized. Markedly, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics has stated that a well-planned vegan or vegetarian diet can be healthier and more appropriate than a non-vegetarian diet for all stages of life, including infants and toddlers. To get more light on your knowledge about how to meet your child’s nutritional needs, be sure to check out the Books below:
3. Be Patient and Wait For Your Family To Bloom Vegan
Being a vegan for a long or even for a newby vegan you might have received doubts or questions from non-vegans in your life. Especially when it comes to vegan parenting, vegan parents are most likely to experience a heavy shower of skeptical queries from non-vegans. As there is no one-size-fits-all response to such queries, it is crucial to have patience with those around us. People tend to believe when they see t for themselves. So, we should let them see how our family thrives on a plant-based diet to make them believe it. Also, we have to keep in mind that making our kids switch to a vegan lifestyle needs immense patience as well.
4. Plan Ahead of Social Events For Your Kids
As a matter of fact, a little preparation runs a long way while raising a vegan family. The Whether your kid is off to school for the first time or on their way to a friend’s birthday party, You should always prepare them to extract the fun from any event while upholding your family’s values and priorities. It is crucial to consider how to help your little one enjoy various events with same-age peers and yet not get affected by the non-vegan beliefs and not feel an outcast. A simple question like “what’s being served?” at any event your kid is supposed to attend will make matters easier for them. Therefore, planning ahead of any event can ensure that there is a vegan option available besides non-vegan food for your kids to enjoy and be a part of such events. You can contribute to making vegan options yourself for such events. Surely your vegan treats will leave everyone in an aw and at the same time make your kid feel proud of being vegan.
5. Educate Your Kids and People Around You Early
There’s a common misconception that needs to be cleared up with others as early as you decide to turn your kid vegan. Speaking of which, it should be clear to others that as vegans, we are not forcing our kids to eat a vegan way. Rather, we are teaching them how to make their food choices on their own and guiding them through the impact those choices may have on their health and the world around them.
Moreover, we naturally teach other important values such as empathy, kindness, compassion, and how to treat other living beings by educating our kids about veganism. However, these teachings should always be appropriate to their developmental stages and tailored according to their needs and level of understanding. Precisely, you can teach them through extensive family conversations, reading out books, and participating in local vegan community events, farms, and sanctuaries.
6. Get Involved in a Vegan Community
To involve your little ones in your vegan journey as a family, assigning your family to your local vegan community is a great way. For example, volunteering at a local vegan event, participating in vegan community activism, or visiting local farms and sanctuaries can prove to be helpful for the entire family to learn and evolve together as vegans. Also, teaching children how to speak out against injustice molds them to become future thoughtful and informed citizens of the world!
7. Variety On A Plate Is The Key
Firstly, raising vegan kids doesn’t mean you won't ever be dealing with the occasional fuss they throw over mealtime. However, exposing your kids to a diverse range of plant-based vegan foods can be incredibly beneficial for their health. Also, the variety of plant-based whole food you offer them will ignite their curiosity-spark.
Check out these books with playful recipes you can make with your kids:
Forks Over Knives Family: Every Parent’s Guide to Raising Healthy, Happy Kids on a Whole-Food, Plant-Based Diet
You can also find a wide range of exciting vegan snacks in the snack section of Vegandukan to tempt your kids to maintain their interest in plant-based foods.
8. Find Your F3: Family Favorite Foods
As families bond better when all the members vibe together on spending enough family time doing some fun activities, a vegan family should spend time together in the kitchen. That being said, the more you spend time with vegan food more you connect with veganism. Also, if you have the opportunity, dine out at your nearby family-friendly vegan restaurants too! People who eat together are most likely to think together, guys. So, vibe on vegan food.
9. Choose Progress Over Perfection
When it comes to vegan parenting, it sometimes gets hard to admit that we don’t always have the answers on how to navigate every unique situation. However, with parenting in general, we are bound to make mistakes in the long run, no matter how hard we try to drive with perfection. Therefore, raising vegan kids adds incredibly worthwhile and especially unique challenges.
So, whether you are new to the vegan journey or a longtime vegan yourself, the key to long-lasting change for your family is the progress you make slowly over the perfection you seek readily.
However, incorporating new alterations for kids can be burdensome, but allowing them opportunities to explore new foods and peaching important conversations can be meaningful steps in the right direction. Just believe in yourself and your ways!
10. Have Fun
Perhaps the major thing to keep in mind on this beautiful adventure of vegan parenting is to enjoy it in the first place! As we are the greatest role model to our children, we are well on our way to raising healthy, happy, joyful vegan kids. We just have to prioritize our family’s values regarding kindness and compassion. Also, we have to value the health and well-being of our family.
So, in case you need a quick reminder, it’s ok to make a mess. Therefore, we should let our little ones help in the kitchen, enjoy preparing the meal with us, and play with the wide variety of vegan foods to know our diet better. That is how we should share lessons and embrace a vegan family that will shape them for the rest of their lives, even if there’s a breakfast smoothie dripping from the ceiling. Have fun!
Twinkle Twinkle Vegan Ghar
What makes a house home? Of course, the people and their bonding in it. And how do we bond with our loved ones? Through the shared interests and similar lifestyle choices for obvious! As veganism is not just about dietary choices but an entire lifestyle switch, vegan parents must share the vegan vibes to bond stronger with our kids and make our Makan a Vegan Ghar in the process.
Kids are the black canvas to paint with our teachings. That is why what we want our kids to learn is continuously overlapped by outside influences. For this, clarifying our belief systems to our little ones becomes a never-ending task. However, it is crucial to make our vegan kids understand what it means to be compassionate towards animals and teach them ethical values. And most importantly, we need to help them learn how to practice a vegan lifestyle without alienating those who don’t hold the same beliefs.
That’s all guys. Let’s help our vegan kids follow in our footsteps towards a healthy and cruelty-free life.
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Frequently Asked Questions
- What do Vegan Parents need to focus on for their kid’s diet?
- There are some pros and cons of raising a child vegan. Therefore, vegan parents need to take care of those points. Firstly, plant protein is less accessible to the body and may or may not be a complete protein source. And for that reason, as a precaution, people on vegan diets need to eat more protein than those who rely on animal-based diets. However, keeping the calories in mind, the amount of protein a child needs depends on their age and size.
- What are the cons of raising a kid vegan?
- Emphatically, the biggest concern with vegan diets for infants and toddlers is nutritional inadequacy. So, parents need to be very careful and well-informed about the nutrition of vegan food, to avoid the risk of some essential nutrients falling short. Nutrients that often get deficient in a vegan diet are vitamin D, calcium, iron, omega-3 fatty acids, vitamin B12, etc.
- What are the Pros of raising a child vegan?
- Explicitly, vegan foods are lower in saturated fats naturally. So, the good news that comes with a vegan diet is a lower risk of heart disease and a well-maintained cholesterol level. However, to boost the nutrition level, the NHS (National Health Service, England) recommends vegan babies and children eat a wide variety of vegan foods to gain the proper energy and vitamins they need for growth.
- What are the essential needs of vegan children?
- Speaking of the crucial nutrient for kids on a vegan diet, all vegan kids must receive a reliable Vitamin B12 supplement, preferably at the time they start consuming solid foods. This essential nutrient naturally lacks in plant-based foods. Therefore, taking it as a supplement besides fortified foods is the most important to meet the RDA level.
- How to convince kids to make a switch to a vegan diet?
- It can be tricky to convince kids to turn vegan who is not on a vegan diet since birth or early childhood. Transitioning an older kid to a new diet plan is hard for sure. Therefore, the following tips can be considered while convincing such kids.
- Talk to them about what exactly is going to change in their diet.
- Make them switch gradually.
- Make your kids participate in preparing vegan meals.
- Make their favorite meals vegan with plant-based alternatives.
- Invite other kids, preferably the friends of your kids to your vegan feast.
- Be Patient.
