“I’m not eating that. It looks like brains.”
My son Leo, who is ten, was staring at a plate of steamed broccoli with the same level of disgust I reserve for scraping old leftovers out of the fridge. My daughter Maya, who just turned thirteen, rolled her eyes and pushed her own vegetables around her plate with her fork, as if she was trying to arrange them into a more aesthetically pleasing shape.
It’s the standard 7 p.m. standoff in our house. I have a stir-fry on the stove, two growing kids who would rather eat pasta with butter for every meal, and a sinking feeling that they aren’t getting everything they need nutritionally.
I used to think vitamins were a simple solution. When they were toddlers, I gave them those sticky gummy multivitamins shaped like bears. It was easy. They’d chew them up like candy, and I’d pat myself on the back for covering my bases. But as they get older, the stakes change, and the questions get more complicated. Leo is now in that weird middle space where he’s constantly hungry but extremely suspicious of any food that isn’t a carb. Maya is in the middle of puberty, growing at a rate that makes my head spin, and her diet has suddenly become more about social choices than what is actually good for her.
I started noticing little things. Maya told me she was getting headaches in the afternoon. A few times, Leo fell asleep on the couch while doing his reading log, something he used to do with zero complaints. They weren’t sick, but they didn’t seem quite right either. We are not a family that visits the doctor unless something is bleeding or on fire, so I found myself second-guessing every meal I made.
So, I did what any modern parent does. I went to the vitamin aisle at the drugstore and stood there for twenty minutes, completely overwhelmed.
That’s the thing about vitamins for this age group. The marketing makes it look so straightforward. There’s a bottle for focus, a bottle for immunity, a bottle for growth spurts, and a bottle for picky eaters. But most of what’s on the shelf is either a low dose of everything, which is basically just colored water, or it’s a mega-dose of things kids don’t actually need. The cheap gummy vitamins are packed with sugar and gelatin, and the “teen” varieties are often just rebranded adult formulas.
Rather than guessing, I made a change in how I approach the whole “supplement” thing. I stopped thinking of a vitamin as a magic pill that fixes a bad diet and started thinking about it as a seatbelt for the car ride. It’s there for extra safety, but it isn’t the thing that gets you where you need to go.
The first thing I looked at was iron. This was a big one for Maya. When she got her period a few months ago, I remembered my own pediatrician telling my mom that teenage girls are one of the most iron-deficient groups out there. It makes sense. They are losing blood every month, and they are growing, and their bodies are building up stores for the future. When I thought about that, her afternoon headaches started to make more sense. She wasn’t dehydrated, she was likely running low on iron.
I started leaving beef jerky and dried apricots in the pantry, added a handful of fortified cereal to her morning yogurt, and got her a daily vitamin that specifically mentioned iron on the label. This wasn’t something I ever considered when they were six and eating nothing but dinosaur nuggets. It’s a conversation that parents need to have, especially as girls approach puberty.
Leo is a different story. He’s outside playing for hours, but he’s also growing so fast that his knees hurt sometimes. I mentioned this to our pharmacist once while picking up a prescription, and he stopped me. He asked if Leo gets enough Vitamin D. I shrugged. He gets plenty of sun, I thought. But the pharmacist explained that Vitamin D is actually really tricky. It’s not just about sunlight. It’s about how the body processes it, and a lot of kids in this age group are deficient, especially if they’re lathering on sunscreen all summer (which they should) or if they spend the dark winter months inside looking at screens.
So now, both kids take a basic Vitamin D drop each morning. It’s not a complicated system. I keep the bottle right next to the coffee machine. When I get my cup, they take their drop. It’s the closest thing to a morning routine I have that guarantees everyone gets at least one “big” vitamin.
But the biggest realization for me wasn’t about what was on the shelf. It was about how I was approaching dinner and snacks. Instead of lecturing them about what they weren’t eating, I started doing what I call “food bridges.” If Leo wants pasta, I cook the pasta but I also roast some cherry tomatoes and spinach and stir it into the sauce while it’s hot. He can’t pick the spinach out because it shrinks down and just looks like dark bits of basil. When he asks what it is, I just say “herbs.” It works about seventy percent of the time.
For Maya, it was about taking her to the grocery store with me. We went on a Saturday morning, just the two of us. I gave her the cart and a budget and told her to pick out three things she thought looked fun that weren’t chips or cookies. She narrowed her eyes, expecting a lecture. But I actually let her be in charge. She picked out a bag of colorful sweet peppers, some hummus, and some frozen mango chunks. The mango didn’t last the walk home. She ate it straight out of the bag.
Having her be involved shifted something. Now, if I say “you should eat a piece of fruit,” she reacts like I’ve asked her to clean the bathroom. But if I say “hey, can you cut up those peppers to go with dinner?” it’s a task, not a reprimand.
There’s still a gap. I can’t stand over them all day and make sure they eat perfectly balanced meals. There are days when I send Leo to school with a Lunchable and a granola bar because laundry was a nightmare and the grocery trip didn’t happen. There are days Maya lives on microwave noodles and Greek yogurt.
But those aren’t failure days. They’re just days.
The vitamins aren’t a cure-all. Honestly, I think the biggest benefit of giving them is that it forces me to think about what else is going on in their bodies. If they are irritable, I look at sleep first, then food. If they are tired, I look at hydration before I blame a lack of pills.
We’re still figuring it out. Maya has zero interest in a multivitamin that tastes like a candy, so she gets the iron pill and a separate blend of B-complex. Leo will only take the gummy form, so we make a deal—he gets the gummy, but he also has to eat the crust on his bread.
It’s not perfect. There are still arguments about the color of vegetables, and I still find the floor covered in the occasional half-chewed supplement that clearly missed its target. But I’m less anxious about it now. I’ve stopped treating the vitamin aisle like a place of panic and started treating it like a map. It’s a way to check in, a small tool to help fill the gaps while we work on the more important, slower task of teaching them how to eat real food.
The process is still ongoing. I’m fairly certain the day will come when Leo takes his first sip of black coffee and Maya decides she’s a vegetarian for a month. When that happens, I’ll adjust the routine again. For now, the bottles on the counter and the veggie-heavy dinners are enough. It’s not perfect, but it’s working well enough to keep everyone moving forward, one meal at a time.
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