I’ve been stressing about my kid’s vitamins and I think I’m doing it wrong
I found a stash of half-chewed gummy vitamins behind our living room couch last weekend, when I was fishing out a lost AirPod that had been missing for three days. They were tucked under a crumpled bag of half-eaten Goldfish, a disembodied Lego minifigure hand, and a sticky fruit snack that had turned into some kind of amber plastic. Six of them. Six half-chewed, saliva-dusted vitamins. When I confronted my 12-year-old, he shrugged and said they stick to his braces, and he didn’t want me to nag him about it, so he just spit them out after I left the room. Turns out he’d been doing that for almost three months. I’d been standing there every morning going “vitamin?” he’d mumble yeah, and I’d check it off my mental list of good parent things I did that day. Turns out that list item was just a lie.
I have two kids, 8 and 12, so right in that messy 7 to 14 sweet spot where everything about eating is a battle. My 8-year-old only eats food that’s orange. Goldfish, Cheetos, cheddar crackers, carrot sticks, that’s it. If it’s any other color, it goes in the napkin, or under the table, or given to the dog when I’m not looking. My 12-year-old is a preteen who gets all his nutrition advice from TikTok, so right now he only eats chicken nuggets and raw cucumber, because he saw a 19-year-old influencer say cucumbers are negative calorie and that means you can eat as many as you want and not gain weight. I’ve tried everything to get him to eat a vegetable that isn’t cucumber. Nothing works. So of course I worry they’re not getting whatever they need to grow all those bones and brains and random, out-of-nowhere mood swings.
Last month I was standing on the sidelines of my 8-year-old’s soccer game, and another mom started chatting about vitamins. She pulls out this fancy little glass bottle from her tote bag, all matte label and organic whole-food this and that, says it’s $42 a bottle and her kid hasn’t had a cold in two years. She asked what I give mine, and I panicked. I was holding the generic Target gummy bottle in my overstuffed bag (okay, I still carry a diaper bag, don’t judge, it fits all the extra socks and water bottles) that cost $7.99 and has cartoon dinosaurs on the label. I faked getting a text from my kid’s teacher and ducked to get a coffee instead. I felt so stupid, like I was skipping a whole basic parent requirement.
I went home that night and spent an hour scrolling through mom groups reading about what everyone else does. Some people swear by these big gel capsules that their kids swallow whole, but my kids can’t even swallow a children’s Tylenol without gagging like they’re gonna throw up all over the counter. Some people do liquid vitamins, but I tried that once two years ago, and my kid knocked the bottle over on the white kitchen counter, and I still have a faint purple stain there that won’t come out, so that’s out. Fancy organic ones are way too expensive, I can’t justify $40 a month when half of them are gonna end up behind the couch anyway, right?
I caved and ordered a mid-priced one from Amazon, $32 a bottle, said it was for “tweens and picky kids” whatever that means. It showed up in that same fancy glass bottle I’d seen at the soccer game, and the first day my 8-year-old tried to grab it off the counter to see what it tasted like, dropped it, and it shattered all over the kitchen tile. I spent 25 minutes on my hands and knees picking shards of glass out of the grout, and half the vitamins went down the drain when I wiped it up. That was $16 down the drain for nothing. I sat on the floor after that and ate a chocolate chip cookie that was supposed to be for the kids’ after school snack, and just thought, what is the point of this anyway?
When we were at the 12-year-old’s annual checkup a couple weeks later, I asked the pediatrician about it. I said, “My kids eat garbage, should I be getting them fancy vitamins? Am I hurting them by getting the cheap ones?” She laughed, leaned against the exam table, and said most kids that eat even a tiny variety of food have all the vitamins they need. She said if your kid drinks milk, they’ve got calcium. If they eat any fruit at all, that’s vitamin C. The only one most kids this age are commonly missing is D, and even that, if they play outside for 20 minutes a day, they get enough. She said all the fancy targeted blends and organic labels are just marketing to parents who already feel guilty about enough things as it is. Oh. That’s not what I expected to hear. I thought she’d tell me I need to step up my game.
I’ve been thinking about that a lot since then. This age, 7 to 14, everything feels like a test, doesn’t it? Are you feeding them right? Are they getting enough sleep? Are their screens too much? Vitamins feel like this tiny little box you can check, you know? It’s easy. You hand them a gummy, you did your job. If you get the expensive one, you get extra credit. But the reality is, half the time they spit it out behind the couch, or drop the bottle and break it, or eat three when you’re not looking because they think it’s candy. My sister has a 10-year-old, she doesn’t even do vitamins at all. Her kid eats nothing but pepperoni pizza and Sour Patch Kids most days, and he’s taller than me, gets A’s, hasn’t missed a day of school for sickness in two years. So what’s the big secret? There is no secret.
Right now, I’m back to the $7.99 dinosaur gummies from Target. I remind them to take one every morning after breakfast. I don’t go digging through the couch cushions to count them anymore. If my 12-year-old spits it out because it sticks to his braces, whatever. If my 8-year-old sneaks an extra one once a week, I don’t yell like I used to—he’s just hungry for candy, it’s not the end of the world. Last week another mom asked me what vitamins I use at soccer practice, and I didn’t fake a text this time. I told her the truth: I get the cheap ones, half the time they don’t take them anyway, I’m just winging it. She laughed and admitted she does the exact same thing, her 11-year-old hides his vitamins in the back of the shoe bin.
I still get that little twinge of guilt sometimes, like I should be doing more, should be better. But most days, I look at my two messy, loud, too-tall kids running around the yard yelling at each other over who gets the frisbee, and I think. They’re fine. I’m not gonna ruin them with cheap vitamins. That’s as good as it gets right now, I guess.
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