Spawn Better!

Feeding your child once you’re back at work

December 6, 2010

Not everyone has a job where this can happen...

This week’s question comes from Stacey, who’s planning on returning to work at around the 12 month mark. She’s not sure about excessive use of soy, but everything she’s read about vegan parenting seems to suggest that going back to work means heavy use of soy formula.

This seemed a little off to me, and it’s alarming a the very least – after all, we’ve already discovered that there’s no such thing as fully vegan baby formula, solid foods are going to be mixed in at that point, and with all the Council members who were feeding into the third year, I figured some of them had to be working. I passed the question on to the Council of Vegan Parents to see what their experiences had taught them. Here’s what they had to say:

Pump it

Kristie gave this (ahem) formula for formula-free success: “Before Stacey goes back, for maybe a month or so, she should pump after the baby’s nursed and around 11pm (something about milk production increasing around that time) so that when she returns to work, she will have a store of breastmilk in the freezer. The baby can have then have bottles or cups of thawed (in the fridge) and warmed (with a water bath) breastmilk during the day while she’s at work.”

If you’re still exclusively breastfeeding, pumping can seem like a huge effort, but remember, as solids start to get introduced, you’ll have a bit more supply available to put in the “bank.”

Monica advised to take “pump breaks” at work if possible to keep the supply going. This might not work for all job scenarios, but most companies will allow them, just like they do smoke breaks. Talk with your boss if you think there’d be an issue.

Get in league with the League

The La Leche League, that is. Their primary mission is to encourage and support breastfeeding, and there are chapters all over the place. I’ve never attended a meeting, but Angela’s had nothing but good things to say about them. We’ve got a few leaders in the Council that have happily shared advice in the past, but you’re much better off meeting in person so you can dig deep and get the answers you’re looking for.

Meetings are held regularly all over the place – click here to search for one in your area.

You’re still home some of the time

It’s important to remember that even if you’re away for a good chunk of the day, you’re probably still going to be around for feedings at night and in the morning. If you’re shooting for 3 servings of milk per day, that’s 2 of them right there.

Monica passed on an extra tip for night feeds: “many babies whose moms have gone back to work, often make up for missed nursing time with night time nursing sessions, so they find it easier to take their babies in bed with them to avoid waking up many times during the night and then having to go to work half asleep.”

People are doing it

One of my favourite things about Spawn Better and the Council is the first-hand advice that might not always apply to each individual situation, but definitely feels more comforting than some theory from a book that might not even be written by a parent.

Kristie gave some reassuring history: “With my older daughter, I went back to work after 8 weeks and nursed her (almost exclusively for 12 months because she wasn’t interested in other foods) for more than two years without any need for formula. With my younger daughter, I returned to work when she was four months old, and we’re still nursing (she’s now 20 months old.) We did have some issues initially getting her to take a bottle, but that only lasted two weeks. She stopped wanting breastmilk from a bottle or cup around 14 or 15 months. She nurses at night and in the mornings, and all weekend. No formula ever.”

What if you’re not breastfeeding?

If you’ve already stopped breastfeeding, odds are this is less of an issue overall for you – just continue doing what you’re doing. Elaine reminded us to prefer vegan dietary advice from mainstream sources (it’s going to be a bit more conservative, in general, and hopefully safer) such as the American Dietetic Association.

Stacey also managed to answer part of her own question during some follow-up research: as a fan of Vega, the vegan meal replacement shake mix, she asked Sequel Naturals if it was safe for young children. They replied “all of the Vega products, except for the Sport line are safe for your children. We recommend a much smaller serving size for children under one and we always encourage you to take a list of the ingredients to your health care professional for final review.”

More info

As Monica pointed out, working doesn’t have to mean weaning. In addition to the La Leche League, she recommended the book Nursing Mother, Working Mother: The Essential Guide for Breastfeeding and Staying Close to Your Baby After You Return to Work by Gale Pryor.

And of course if you’ve got any follow up questions, you can leave them in the comments or pass them on directly, and we’ll try to get some followup from the Council.

If you’ve figured out how to make the return to work a little easier than you first thought it’d be, please share your ideas in the comments!

Thanks to Kristie, Monica and Elaine for their help on this one!

{ 2 comments }

Dealing with picky eaters

November 10, 2010

Yep, start 'em young, and kale's not a problem!

For this week’s question, we’re going into the world of the picky eater. If veganism is constrained by a smaller overall selection of foods, what happens if your child doesn’t want to eat any of them? In other words, how do you get your child to eat their fruits and vegetables if he or she is a picky eater?

I asked the Council of Vegan Parents what they had to say on the subject, and wow, they said a lot!

Once again, not a vegan problem

One of the themes that keeps coming up here is that a lot of parenting problems aren’t really vegan problems, but they can be perceived as barriers to veganism for some until you call them out. Picky eating probably falls into that category, but based on the feedback from the Council, we’ve got it pretty good!

As Erin put it, “it’s funny because I find that our vegan diet is far more varied than our omnivorous diet was, and so our daughter has so much variety she doesn’t seem to have any picky tendencies.”

In other words, vegans may have fewer overall choices, but we tend to take advantage of a lot more options than the “here’s your meat, here’s your starch, here’s your green” plating that can happen in the omnivore world, so your picky eaters might actually have more choices available than if you weren’t a vegan family.

Work with, not on

Nobody recommended staging an epic battle with your picky eater over broccoli, and it seems that the winning approach is to explain and negotiate.

Linda says “we also want them to eat a variety of healthy foods! What works well with my 5 and 3 year olds is simply explaining this… I ask them to try it and tell them they can spit it right back out if they don’t like it… If they refuse, I tell them I will just leave it on their plate, ‘just in case’ and I walk away. Usually, they will try it.”

Valerie formalized the process a little more: “we have a rule that he needs to try at least one or two bites of whatever is served for dinner.”

Lead by example

As everyone who’s heard one of their children’s early words have four letters in it knows, kids learn a lot from what you’re doing. If you make fruits and vegetables a key part of your meals, they’re going to be much more likely to follow your lead, as opposed to a “do as I say not as I do” scenario.

Like Erin says, “when I was a kid, vegetables were loved in my household, even though there was meat too. I never knew that kids didn’t usually like veggies because no one saw any reason to share that bit of information with me. We don’t realize how much we shape others’ feelings.”

Repetition, repetition

It’s important to realize that most new flavours aren’t going to be a hit the first time around, regardless of whether you’ve got a picky eater or not. Linda says, “With kids you often have to present a food many many times before they learn to like it. It takes a long time for some foods to feel familiar to them. Forcing it will backfire.”

Always have a plan B

So what if your picky eater refuses everything on the plate? Is it time to drop everything and make a new dish? Not so fast, says Erin: “I think a lot of parents offer more and more choices over and over when the kid throws stuff on the floor. This just teaches them to be picky and wait until their favorite thing is given.”

But again, what if they’re not eating? Here’s Linda’s solution: “another thing I do, is if they completely refuse to eat the meal I make, I will not make another, but tell them they can either eat what I made, or choose ONLY raw fruits or vegetables out of the refrigerator. This way, they choose their favorite healthy option and I don’t need to make another meal!”

Finally, it’s handy to remember that just like this isn’t the last meal they’ll ever refuse, it’s not the last one they’ll ever eat, either. As Valerie explains, “kids will eventually eat when they’re hungry. If the only options available in the home are the healthy ones, they won’t starve. ”

Try lots of things

As we said above, it can take a lot of attempts for a food to “click” with your child, and one way to keep things fresh while increasing the chances of a hit is to vary things, and there are a lot of ways to do that!

Steph had a wide range of options, including changing the temperature (for things like marinated tofu pieces,) spices used (bland isn’t always preferred,) the size of the pieces (both to fit in their hands and to change the texture in sauces,) and you can also let food get eaten off your plate, because things always look more interesting that way.

Valerie found it helpful to vary the colour of the foods, at least in smoothies, specifically ones with leafy greens added in – you can change the green/purple mix by simply adjusting the berry to greens ratio.

What about hiding foods?

While most of the feedback this week was pretty unanimous, one area where there was some debate involved whether or not to “hide” food from your picky eaters by blending it into sauces or pureés. This might have more to do with the ages of the children involved, so here are both viewpoints!

Valerie had great luck via the book Deceptively Delicious: Simple Secrets to Get Your Kids Eating Good Food by Jessica Seinfeld [affiliate link]: “Basically, she teaches parents how to hide tons of pureed fruits and/or veggies into foods that many kids already like. It’s not a vegan book by any means, but has great ideas and most recipes are easily veganizable.”

Steph and Erin had other thoughts on the matter, which centered on teaching their children what foods are supposed to look like, and keeping the same menu for everyone at the table.

Like I said, this might be an age thing, and pickiness probably varies from child to child, so I’d love to hear more experiences in the comments!

Enjoy yourself

Let’s close this one off with a reminder from Steph to have some fun along the way: “looking at anything through the eyes of a child makes it new again. He likes to play with his food, which is awesome, so we like to take it outside sometimes to let him learn without worrying about the mess.”

Of course, this isn’t the end of the topic, because we haven’t heard from you yet! Is your child a picky eater? Did you figure out any ninja tricks to get some foods on the favourites list? Let us know in the comments!

Thanks to Linda, Steph, Valerie and Erin for their help on this one!

{ 2 comments }

Does it matter what vegan parents call their foods?

November 3, 2010

Yes, it's probably horribly inappropriate, but it's the best demonstration on confusion I could find on my hard drive. Cheers!

Besides the obvious perks like fame, glory, and preferred parking places at theme parks (we kid, we kid) members of the Council of Vegan Parents get to have their questions answered before anyone else, and that’s what happened this week when we fielded a query from Erin, who asked:

“What do you call things? I always say ‘milk,’ ‘cheese,’ ‘burgers,’ ‘mac n’ cheese,’ ‘jerky,’ ‘ice cream,’ ‘yogurt,’ ‘rice crispy treat,’ when what I mean are things like soy milk, Daiya or Follow Your Heart vegan cheese, Boca or other homemade veggie burgers, quinoa macaroni with almond and nooch sauce, spicy seitan Primal Strips, Rice Cream or Coconut ice cream, soy yogurt, or puffed millet and ricemallow treats. It’s odd for me because I have veganized many of my favorite foods from my omni days, and I still use the omni language. But my daughter has always been vegan, and as she goes out into a nonvegan world I don’t want her to get confused (especially when she’s still so young it’s hard to understand) that OUR cheese is not the same as Jimmy’s cheese, so you can’t eat that, or when there’s a pizza party and she thinks, ‘We eat pizza, I love that!’ My husband will say to her, ‘Do you want some soy milk in your cup?’ whereas I just ask if she wants some milk. I’m wondering how other vegan parents have handled this and how the transition went for them either way that they handled it.”

It’s a great question, and I thought it’d be a quick survey, but the Council had other ideas…

It’s a mix

It turns out that while some people are strict over what gets called what, many vegan parents use a mix of terms for foods, just like vegan non-parents do, but frankly, just like all people tend to do. As Meredith pointed out, some people call margarine “butter,” and I’ve heard that “Coke” can mean a lot of different beverages. Some parents use different words in the house and outside as well.

Confusion is confusing!

The real issue is why some words are getting picked over others, and that’s the confusion issue. It’s fine in the home, where you have (most of the) control over what gets eaten, but in social situations, particularly ones where the parents aren’t around, there’s some concern over whether or not kids will get confused, possibly make “mistakes,” or feel left out. As Matthew put it, he calls burgers veggie burgers specifically because he “…would be too grossed out if [his daughter] ate a real one of these by accident.”

Despite the obvious concerns, some families never have much of a problem, despite mixed languages around foods. Julie threw some science at the issue: “I seem to remember reading… that kids naturally accept that words can have multiple meanings. I think I read about it in the context of small children not making the connection between the ‘chicken’ on their plate and the ‘chicken’ animal that they were crazy about, and about how it was easy for them to accept that the same word could be used for two completely different things and didn’t in any way suggest that the two might be related.”

Age matters

Age-appropriateness seems to be key for just about every Council member who addressed the confusion theme. As Al put it, “between the ages of 2 and 4, it’s something you probably have to worry about… once they get older, it won’t matter what you call the food in your house. Though when they’re younger, it’s a good idea to put those modifiers in there.” This was seconded by several parents with older children, who report it being less of an issue than it used to be.

As for what age it starts to get easier, that varies with every family, and has a lot to do with the environments they’re in. From what I was able to gather, you’ll be able to figure that one out for your own situation pretty easily.

In the meantime, it’s a good idea to talk things through with your children. Kristie’s had discussions with her (almost 4 year old) daughter about the differences between soy, rice, hemp and other milks and cow’s milk, and had a handy tip for those of you with more than one child: “It helps that I’m still nursing her younger sister (19 months), so she understands that milk from animals (including me!) is for babies. ”

Children trust their parents

Several Council members noted that their children know that food from parents is “safer” than food from the outside world. As Denise notes, her daughter “…knows that anything I give her, she can eat. If someone else gives her something to eat, she always asks to make sure that she can eat it before starting.”

You know, I think some meat-eating parents might be a bit jealous of families where the children always ask before they eat things…

Of course, there’s another option…

All this confusion about mock meats and milks could be avoided by simply not eating any of these products, and that’s the route taken in various degrees by several Council members. A lot of these products, mock meats in particular, have been (perhaps rightly) called “vegan junk food” by some, and there’s a case to be made for reducing them from all our diets, but at the same time they’re incredibly convenient and time is at a premium for parents, so it’s a bit of a trade-off.

That said, fortified soy (or hemp, or rice, or almond, or whatever comes next) milk can be a great way to get a lot of nutrients quickly, so it’s probably the least likely item to disappear from the fridge and remains a source of possible confusion.

Further reading

Here’s a blogger pro-tip: if you write an article once, it might seem like a lot of work but then you can just point people to it when questions come up, and that’s Celeste did! Here’s a great recap of her adventures in naming milk, and some lessons learned along the way. Be sure to check out the rest of her site too, because I’ve already seen her answer to next week’s question

What words do you use?

What about you? Do you mix and match, choose carefully, or just pick names for foods at random?  Has it caused any issues or solved any problems in your home?  Let us know in the comments!

Thanks to Denise, Kristie, Kim, Meredith, Matthew, Al, Trin, Celeste and Julie for their help with this one!

{ 4 comments }

Vegan Hallowe’en part 2: the giving

October 27, 2010

We’ve covered how our Council of Vegan Parents handles vegan Hallowe’en candy from a child’s perspective, but what do you do when you’re the one stuck at home giving out treats to everyone who comes to your door?

Vegan-friendly candy

Several members of the Council have sought out some “top shelf” goodies, either online or at their health food store. Kari found vegan gummy bears at Whole Foods, and I apologize in advance for the 10 pounds you might gain from this link, but Rebecca pointed out the Natural Candy Store which apparently is open year round, but they’ve got a vegan category and everything.

Packaged baked goods are also an option – it’s too late this year and it’s local to Toronto, but by way of example Sweets From the Earth had a deal this year where you could get 100 individually wrapped chocolate chip cookies for $18. If you have a bakery in your area, check to see if they have specials, or depending on the volume of visitors in your neighbourhood, it might be affordable to break open some boxes of single serving vegan desserts.