Veggies Forever

Teaching children to eat— and stay—vegan.

- Kaitlin Jones

My mother always had a passion for healthy eating and tried to share those values with me and my siblings. However, I was not interested in being the only kid to eat whole-grain wheat bread when everyone else seemed to be living in a Wonder Bread world. What persuaded me to eat healthier, and ultimately vegan, were some insights from my older sister who taught me about factory farming—the practice of raising livestock in high-density confinement to produce meat, milk, and eggs for human consumption. After discovering what she had learned, I immediately became a vegetarian. It took another year before my mother and I went completely vegan, having her full support made the transition much easier.

While it hasn’t been too difficult to teach my own children to eat vegan— because they generally eat what my husband and I eat—I was much older when I became a vegan. Learning to choose the right foods and change many of my eating habits was much harder, especially without a lot of support from my peers. Today it’s much more likely your kids will have friends eating the same vegan or vegetarian diet, especially with recent support from the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics and the American Academy of Pediatrics for “well-planned vegetarian and vegan eating patterns” for young children.

TEACHING KIDS TO CHOOSE THE RIGHT FOODS