I Never Thought About My Kids’ Vitamins Until This Messy Winter
I have two kids, 8 and 12, right in that 7 to 14 age range that all the parenting books talk about like it’s one single, predictable stage, which it’s absolutely not. Jax is still losing teeth and leaving sticky popsicle handprints on every wall, Mia is already shaving her legs and rolling her eyes at me for singing along to the radio in the car. The one thing they have in common this past year? They’ve turned into the pickiest eaters I’ve ever met. I used to brag quietly to my friends struggling with picky eaters that mine would eat anything. Ha. Karma got me good. Jax will pick every broccoli floret off his plate and tuck it into his napkin, and I once found three moldy broccoli bits under his bed when I changed the sheets, so I know he’s not getting his leafy greens anywhere.
Last November, I sat across from Mia’s math teacher, who leaned in and said very gently that Mia’s asleep at her desk by 10 a.m. every single Wednesday. Wednesday’s after early-morning PE, she’s up by 6:30, she gets 9 hours of sleep most nights, so what gives? A week later, Jax’s soccer coach pulled me aside after practice and asked if he was okay, said he’s sitting on the bench half the time complaining his calves hurt too bad to run. That’s when I started thinking about vitamins, something I’d never really given much thought to before.
I’d always rolled my eyes at the whole vitamin thing, honestly. Figured it was just marketing to scared first-time parents, that if you feed your kids they’ll be fine. When I was 12, my mom bought those huge glass bottles of weird chalky vitamins, and I just hid them in the back of my sock drawer until we moved. I found a whole stack of them when we cleaned out the house years later. I figured if I could get away with that, why bother forcing it on my kids?
But after those two conversations, I found myself standing in the vitamin aisle at CVS at 8 p.m. after work, still in my work sweater that had a coffee stain on the cuff, completely overwhelmed. There’s gummies for toddlers, gummies for kids, chewables for pre-teens, capsules for teens, and all of them claim to do everything from boost immune health to make your kid get better grades. I stood there so long the cashier asked if I needed help, and I just blurted out “I have no idea what I’m doing” which was totally true.
I texted my sister, who’s a pediatric nurse, and she texted back immediately half-laughing, said “stop overthinking it. Just get a basic multivitamin, don’t get the ones with more sugar than a lollipop per serving, and call the doctor to check Mia’s vitamin D. That’s the most common deficiency in that age group, especially when they’re inside half the day.” Oh right. I forgot, Mia’s gotten really into hanging out in her room after school drawing and scrolling TikTok, she only goes outside if we drag her. Jax has practice twice a week but that’s it, it’s winter up here so it gets dark at 5 anyway.
Got Mia in for a blood test, and sure enough, her D was way lower than it should be. The doctor said it’s super common for pre-teens – they grow so fast their bodies can’t keep up with what they get from food and sun, especially when you live somewhere with four months of gray sky. So we started her on extra D, and a basic multivitamin for both of them.
First I bought those strawberry gummies that both kids begged for, because they look and taste exactly like candy. Three days later I found Jax with the bottle open on the kitchen counter, he’d eaten like 8 of them. I panicked, called the after-hours nurse, who told me to relax, it’d just give him a stomach ache, which it did. I sat up with him on the bathroom floor for an hour that night, while he complained and I threw the whole gummy bottle in the trash. Turns out those things have 12 grams of added sugar per serving – what the hell? No wonder they taste like candy. I had no idea.
Then came the pre-teen problem. Mia refused to take any chewable or gummy after that, said they were for little kids and she’d die of embarrassment if her friend saw one in our medicine cabinet. So I ended up getting these tiny unflavored capsule multivitamins, and I just break them open into her morning strawberry smoothie. She doesn’t even taste it, most days. Sometimes she catches me stirring it in and makes a big dramatic scene about how I’m trying to poison her, but she drinks it anyway. Jax gets these little melt-in-your-mouth ones that taste like orange, no added sugar, he thinks they’re mints so he doesn’t complain.
It’s three months later now, and it’s not some magic fix. Mia still falls asleep on the couch sometimes on the weekends when she stays up too late binging YouTube. Jax still complains about his legs after a two-hour tournament, but not nearly as much as he used to. His coach said he’s been running nonstop the last few practices, which is a win. Mia’s teacher emailed me last month saying she hasn’t seen Mia napping in math since January, which is all I really asked for.
I still mess up all the time. Some weeks I’m rushing out the door for work and I forget to give them the vitamins for three days straight. Nothing bad happens. Once I bought the really expensive organic brand from the health food store, and I’ve bought the generic $5 brand from the grocery store, I can’t tell any difference. I still read thinkpieces sometimes that say all vitamins are a waste of money for healthy kids, and I feel a little guilty for throwing my money away. Then I remember that Mia’s blood test was low, and now it’s normal, and she’s not sleeping through class anymore, so I don’t feel that guilty.
This age is just messy, isn’t it? One week your kid won’t eat anything but mac and cheese, the next week they’re obsessed with cucumbers for no reason. They grow two inches in six months and their shoes don’t fit anymore and you’re just scrambling to keep up. I don’t have any great, neat advice to give, honestly. I just know I went from thinking vitamins were a total scam to fumbling through it, and it’s working okay for us. I still find half-eaten vitamins hidden under couch cushions sometimes, and that’s fine. No one’s got this all figured out, right?
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