One of the biggest concerns we’re hearing from expectant vegan parents is about finding a supportive pediatrician and family doctor – it seems to be hard enough to find someone for ourselves, so what about small children? We turned this over to the Council of Vegan Parents: how did they find a veg-friendly pediatrician, or what did they do if they found themselves stuck with someone who isn’t supportive?

Here’s the good news: not a single Council member responded with a horror story – at least, not one that they didn’t get out of. Everyone has a doctor and/or pediatrician that they’re happy with, and it didn’t seem like it took any Herculaen efforts to achieve this.

The Council had the following advice, and as always, when I say “advice” I’m referring to the opinions and experiences collected here, and this isn’t official medical counsel, blah blah blah, though saying “consult your health care professional” in a post about finding a health care professional seems confusing. Anyway, here’s what we’ve got for you this week:

Doctor or Pediatrician? Some people in our panel skipped the pediatrician stage altogether and just went for a family practice physician that could be a resource for the whole family. The consensus seems to be that pediatricians can be more critical of parents and tend to schedule in shorter appointments, but that might just be the sampling from our responses.

Know what matters to you. There’s still a bit of “residual awe” around the doctor profession in some parts, and some of you might have a subconscious sense that you’re lucky to even be talking to one. Remember that the doctor isn’t accepting you, you’re accepting the doctor. It’s OK to ask questions, and many of our Council members interviewed three or four doctors before finding one they liked.

Diet really isn’t that big an issue. Most questions our Council members have been getting about diet are the kinds of questions that the doctor asks all parents, not just the vegan ones. As long as your children are hitting their growth targets and seem healthy overall, diet might not come up much in discussions anyway.

Be assertive. If you tell your potential doctor that you’d “like” to raise your children vegan, or that it’d be your “ideal” scenario, then you’re leaving the door open for animal product recommendations. If you’re a vegan family, say so and make it clear that it’s not up for discussion.

Accept that the doctor might not be vegan or vegetarian, and frankly, might not know that much about nutrition in general. A vegan doctor is of course ideal, but they’re pretty rare still. The amount of actual nutrition training in medical school still seems to be fairly low, but if your doctor is open to the idea of veganism and has access to a good nutritionist, you’ll probably do OK.

You can switch doctors later. If things start out simple enough but then you start getting recommendations that don’t sound right, you can always change doctors again. That said, it’s important to listen – if your doctor says that you need to feed your kids milk, that’s one thing, but if every doctor tells you that a diet that’s 95% ketchup is a horrible idea, well, they might not be the ones with a problem…

Don’t hide your veganism. Hiding anything that might be relevant to your family’s health is pretty foolish really, and it’s pretty much guaranteed to come up once your child learns to talk…

So where do you find doctors to interview? Apparently, the phone book was a great start for a lot of our Council members (or Yelp, in this decade.) If you’re lucky enough to get a referral/recommendation from friends, especially vegan friends, then that’s great, but simple phone calls to names in a list can work out fine.

Thanks to Amy, Sarah, Kim, Rebecca, Kristie, Jo, Celeste, Steph and Julie for their help on this one!

Related: Vaccines and your vegan family

(Photo credit: tandemracer)

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Veganizing children's songs

February 23, 2010

This week on SpawnBetter we thought we’d lighten things up a bit and maybe sing a song or two. But what songs? If you’re singing with kids, it just takes one stray reference to Old MacDonald and you could be hit with a ton of questions about what those farm animals are doing there, exactly.

I posed this one to the Council of Vegan Parents:

“What do you do to veganize childrens songs? Or do you at all? For some reason “on top of spaghetti” was in my head this weekend, and I couldn’t think of a good substitute for that poor meatball. Have you revised any popular children’s songs? Does Old MacDonald run a sanctuary? Or have you selected a repertoire of songs that don’t mention farming and animal products? And hey, if this is the first time this idea’s come up, feel free to improvise!”

And answer they did.

Avoiding the issue altogether

As Kristie points out, “with so many songs out there, it’s not too hard to avoid the not so animal-friendly ones,” and Elaine will just make up words on the spot, even if they don’t make sense, should the need arise. Elaine also dips into the wide repertoire of non-children’s songs that are out there.

Depending on the vocabulary you use in your home, it might not be a problem anyway. I have many friends who refer to Earth Balance as “butter,” soy milk as “milk,” etc. Julie’s family is in that camp too, although she’s pretty sure her son has decided that it’s a soy meatball on top of the spaghetti.

This little piggy got noticed

OK, I don’t know how it happened, but I forgot all about “This Little Piggy” when I sent the question out. This proves a genetic abnormality, because it was pretty much the first song that everyone mentioned, what with the roast beef reference and all.

While tofu was the clear winner for substitutions, other alternatives included “this little piggy had popcorn” and “field roast” from Pippi, while Monica and Julie will just use whatever food their children have eaten recently.

Saying bah to wool

Al submitted his variant on a non-food related yet still vegan sensitive classic:

Baa, baa, black sheep,
Have you any wool?
No sir, No sir,
None for you.

None for the master,
None for the dame,
None for the little boy
Who lives down the lane.

Baa, baa, black sheep,
Have you any wool?
No sir, no sir,
None for you.

I lost my poor wheat ball…

I now have it on good authority that wheat balls and neat balls can roll off of a plate of spaghetti like nobody’s business, and soy cheese is a perfect cover.

Old MacDonald gets a pass

Most of our parents left poor Old MacDonald alone, figuring that he either runs a sanctuary or just has a lot of animal friends, but Al took it one step further, and I can’t think of a more fun way to close out a fun topic like this:

A huge thank you to Pippi, Monica, Al, Doh, Julie, Kristie, and Elaine for their help with this one!

What about you? Have you veganized any classics on the fly? What’s the funniest one? Let us know in the comments!

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Dealing with non-vegan family members

January 4, 2010

I might be dating myself here, but did anyone else dream of family harmony like in the Keaton household?

For this week’s question, I asked our Council of Vegan Parents about food issues between their children and the rest of the family:

“Have relatives criticized you (openly or behind you back) for raising your child vegan? Was there concern for your child’s health? Did anyone try to sneak meat into the diet without you knowing? And of course, since this isn’t a big rant session, how did you handle it?”

As it turns out, most of our respondees are doing pretty well, which means we need more feedback! This question actually came up from a few Council members, so it looks like we’ll need some followup. If you’ve had some experiences in this area that might help, please get in touch!

From the feedback we received, it looks like there are a few key things to watch for.

Figure out what the issue is.

Is your family’s veganism the real problem, or is it just that you’re going a different route than, say, your parents went with you? In some cases, there might be some subconscious defence mechanisms at play that have nothing to do with the absence of meat, eggs, and dairy.

Or it could just be a matter of opinion! As Lisa says, “my mother feels I’m cruel in depriving my daughter of crisps but that’s a nutritional rather than a vegan issue.”

Be prepared in advance.

Sarah’s daughter had one set of vegan grandparents out of the gate (how cool is that?) but for the other pair, they opted to get in front of the issue before it even came up: “when Amelia was born, we told them we were going to raise her vegan until she is old enough to decide for herself how she wants to eat.”

No, really, be prepared way in advance.

It helps if you can plan ahead, ideally establishing yourself as a healthy knowedgable person many years before your first child is born. This won’t help you much if you’re a recent vegan, but don’t discount your own experiences and the example you lead. Lisa says “I’d been vegan 17 years before I had my daughter,and my meat eating family had by this time all agreed (after 10 years or so) that they liked my food, that I was stonkingly healthy and that I was more nutritionaly aware than them.”

In other words, if your family knows and trusts your ability to take care of yourself, they’re going to be more likely to trust you with your own children.

Sarah echoes this, saying “everyone in our families knows that we are vegan – and that our arguments for being vegan are so strong that it’s best for them not to challenge us… We’re the healthiest people in our family, so it’d be silly for them to say anything anyway.”

Doh’s family seems to have been wired up to deal with vegan members from an early stage, but she added a bit to the mix: “Part of that is my family’s culture of ‘you do your thing, I’ll do mine,’ and part of it is that I armed myself early on with information and with a don’t-f***-with-me confidence.” As Doh says, “Knowledge and confidence are very useful tools against doubters.”

OK, deal with it as it happens.

Katrina has the unfortunate situation where the family resistance is coming from her son’s father. She deals with this on two fronts: with her son directly and with backup. As she says, “I told my son to just refrain from eating anything that his dad offers him that is not vegan . He does a pretty good job with that… My solution to that is to always have vegan ice cream on hand in case his dad comes over to hand out with him. Another solution I’ve had is to provide food for him when he visits his dad.

Work with, not against.

Lisa has a strategy for group meals that seems to have worked well for her: “when the family meet up I find out what they’re having, ask to share whatever we can and build our meal around that. For example, make a pie to have with veg, or we’ll do a non-dairy and dairy version of a lasagna, sharing the tomato sauce.”

Finally, Elaine had a different perspective as a foster parent: “Bbecause we’re foster parents and this issue could cause some real conflict between us and the birth parents, we’ve chosen to only foster babies. Babies just drink formula, which is easy to find in soy versions.”

When I asked her if she felt she was under even more scrutiny between authorities, birth parents, etc., her answer was actually pretty interesting: “On the one hand there are more people ‘checking up’ on us and looking at our parenting, but on the other hand, they’re not comparing us to some mythical ideal parent, they’re comparing us to a real parent who made a terrible mistake or committed a crime. So… the bar is lower. Ha!”

Elaine also had some information that I thought was really worth repeating, so I’ll close with that:

“For the record, there is a social need for people to be foster parents for babies. They require extra care that many other foster parents are not willing or able to provide. If anyone reading this is interested in becoming a foster parent, please do so! The kids need you.”

Again, a lot of good advice and input from the Council of Vegan Parents, thanks so much! I still think there’s a lot of room for different experiences to be shared, so if you’ve got any tips or advice, please share them in the comments or get in touch to join the Council!

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Vegan birthday parties: I want a falafel cupcake!

December 12, 2009

A little icing and I think the falafel cupcake could work! Photo by kudumomo

In today’s installment of dealing with birthday parties, Joanne wrote in with her experiences.

When she’s hosting the party, it’s not much of an issue making it a vegan event. By now, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to see yet another mention of cupcakes – I had no idea these things were this popular before starting this series! Joanne credits Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World: 75 Dairy-Free Recipes for Cupcakes that Rule with making it easy, and while I’ve never hosted a party with cupcakes from the book (possibly because they don’t survive long enough for guests to arrive!) I will concur that the book’s opened up a whole new world of ideas for desserts.

When Joanne’s boys attend non-vegan parties, they stick to the vegan savory foods, but she’s opted to let them have the birthday cakes or cupcakes if they want them – as she puts it, it’s once in a blue moon and she doesn’t want them to feel singled out.

That said, it looks like Joanne’s done a good job building awareness within her community of parents, so most of them make sure there’s something vegan to eat for them – in fact, at the last party her son told the hosts he was vegan and they ran out to get him a falafel. I wants me some birthday falafel!

Thanks a lot for the input Joanne! A few takeaways here:

Cupcakes cupcakes cupcakes. That’s just in case you haven’t read the 39,431 references to cupcakes on this site yet. Are they the vegan parent’s secret weapon? I need to run a question that doesn’t have anything to do with food to see if they come up.

Do what you do. I’d like to acknowledge Joanne for saying she lets her sons eat non-vegan food from time to time (“lets” might be replacable with “doesn’t stop them from” – I just have the context from the one mail to go from.) I know a lot of vegans who might skip that part out of concern for backlash, but this is one of the reasons I put this site together – so vegan parents could share their stories and learn from each other.

You probably don’t like it when people tell you how to raise your kids, so I’m guessing the same goes for people telling you how to raise your kids vegan. It’s complicated enough that I made a site about it. Do what you do, learn from each other, and if something works or doesn’t work for you, go with it.

Keep in touch with your extended community. Joanne’s kids’ friends’ parents (whew!) for the most part seem to know that Joanne’s famiy is vegan, which is bound to make things a lot easier in social situations. Just introducing yourself to other parents can be enough to make a personal connection that can boost their awareness for a successful “away team” party.

What do you think? Have you ever had, made, or fetched a birthday falafel? How has the reception been at other people’s parties for your child? Let us know in the comments!

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Does a vegan diet help with morning sickness?

November 29, 2009

In today’s column, we reached way back to uncover some of the issues in the very early stages of child rearing. Like, pre-birth. The baby-making phase, if you will. OK, not that early, you gutter-minded people: we’re talking morning sickness.

Does a vegan diet make morning sickness easier? How should I know? I’m a guy with no kids! But I’ve got a secret weapon: the Council of Vegan Moms. (Cue the montage music!) The Council of Vegan Moms are people, possibly just like you, who follow a plant based diet and do the same for their children. Here’s some of their feedback.

“…if being vegan makes morning sickness less horrible, then I really and truly never want to try a non-vegan pregnancy!”

That’s just some of what Julie had to say, and she’s in the middle of her second pregnancy. Interestingly, the second time has been rougher than the first! In round one, the nausea “lifted like clock work” after the first trimester. Round two didn’t go over as well, but five months in she figures she’s through the worst of it.

To make things easier, Julie found that sucking on hard candies and sipping hot tea helped settle her stomach a bit, as did eating in general, which she thinks explains why so much of her total pregnancy weight was gained in the first trimester each time!

“…a vegan pregnancy and giving up the remaining nasties in my diet made me feel the best I have in as long as I can remember.”

Steph had almost the exact opposite experience, and didn’t have any morning sickness at all! While she was more tired than usual during the first trimester, a nap before dinner was all she needed to take care of that. She also cut out caffeine, artificial sweeteners, and booze, which had the added benefit of eliminating the migraines she used to have.

Steph points out that she does know some omnivore friends who didn’t have morning sickness either, so she might have just gotten lucky. Personally, I’d look into moving to her town during the first trimester, just in case there’s something in the water there.

“Everyone told me they were jealous of how healthy I was!”

From the sounds of things, Sarah got off pretty easy with her pregnancy, but she might have paid close attention to her foods and adjusted as needed. She only felt sick one time, and found that chamomile tea helped things pass. Eating less greasy foods in the evening seemed to make the mornings easier as well. For breakfast, Sarah usually had Nature’s Path cereal, oatmeal, or a Luna bar, and she credits the easier digestability of vegan foods with some of her success getting through things with minimal nausea.

“Morning sickness, or more accurately, all day every day sickness…”

Kerri’s experience was a bit of a surprise to her: from what friends had told her, she thought morning sickness would “go a little something like this – get up, puke, eat a few crackers, go on my merry way.” Things didn’t quite work out that way…

Things got into high gear at week 6, when Kerri woke up one morning feeling like she had a stomach flu, which was almost exciting – this was “proof” that something was happening! Of course, one morning’s events can be a lot more fun, if that’s the right word, than ten weeks of constant nausea!

The only thing that helped a little were ginger chews from Whole Foods, which were basically ginger flavoured sugar, but hey, if it works… At the same time, her eating habits underwent massive chages. In the beginning, all she wanted to eat were oranges, bagels (the more white flour, the better!) along with avocado, basil and tomato sandwiches.

And then, almost as abruptly as the nausea kicked in, well, it kept going, but her cravings took a hard left turn, and not towards what nutritionalists would consider for the better… As she puts it, “I couldn’t even look at a fruit or vegetable, or bagel for that matter, without turning green. Suddenly, all I could think about was junk food. Greasy, disgusting, artery clogging fast food. Once a healthy, whole grain and salad lovin’ vegan, I suddenly became a junk food craving lunatic.”

Fast food became the order of the day. While she wanted to eat as healthily as possible, Kerri had to go with what her body was constantly craving, and at least try to do it as healthfully as possible (and vegan!) The worst of it was that she couldn’t even “enjoy” a ten week fast food binge – after a few bites, the craving would disappear, and then the nausea would return.

Thankfully, at around the 16 week mark her cravings turned back to greens, grains and fruit, and she was able to stick to eating, as she puts it, “extraordinarily well.”

I’ll let her finish off her story in here own words: “Oddly enough, the day before I was due I had a craving for Taco Bell again. I decided to indulge since I hadn’t in so long. That ended up being the last meal I ate before my baby girl was born.”

The verdict

So does a vegan diet really help with morning sickness? It’s really hard to tell, with experiences varying so much from person to person and even pregnancy to pregnancy. Even the theory of easy to digest vegan foods being preferable was put to the test, contrasting Kerri’s and Sarah’s stories.

If nothing else, as Julie pointed out it certainly helps that as a vegan, moms-to-be don’t have to worry about cutting out any of the “forbidden” foods that health professionals recommend avoiding, which means that on the occasions where the nausea lets up enough to eat something, you can have pretty much anything that appeals to you.

What about you?

How was morning sickness for you? Do you think it was easier as a vegan? Was there a trick that really helped for you? Let us know and we’ll share it with the rest of the world.

Thanks, Moms!

As noted, this article couldn’t have been possible without the incredible feedback from the Council of Vegan Moms. Without them, I would have probably just sat around drinking beer and writing puke jokes (which I might still do, but I hope this is more constructive.)

A huge thank you to all the moms who shared their stories, some of which didn’t get included here but served as helpful background information: Julie, Sarah, Steph, Kerri, Sylvia, Angela, Jennifer, Teresa, and Gina, thanks so much!

If you’d like to join the Council of Vegan Moms, or the Council of Vegan Dads, or the Council of Vegan Children Who Have To Explain Everything To Their Parents, please get in touch! As you can see, all you have to do is share some of your stories around whatever topic we think up.

Similarly, if you’re facing a challenge with your family, let us know if you’d like to see it as a topic for a future installment of SpawnBetter!

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