I got told today I shouldn’t raise kids because I’d purposefully raise them in a vegan household, without animal products of any sort. I was told this would be dangerous and unfair to the kids.
It was a weirdly direct thing for this person to say to me (one of my coworkers). It’s stuck in my head. I was told I should let my potential children choose what sort of morals they have, even though this person is raising their kids Catholic. Their advice to me was to allow my potential kids to choose every night between a meat-based meal and a vegan meal (???). And several other coworkers agreed. Where do they come up with this? No carnist raises their kids like this.
So is anyone raising vegan kids or does anyone know about what it’s like? Or was anyone here raised in a vegan household?
I have a young child that we are raising vegan. It’s been straightforward enough so far, although she is still little so we haven’t had to deal with other people feeding her yet. Diet-wise it’s fine, usual suspects like b12 obv and pregnancy and breastfeeding has higher micronutrient needs, but that’s not specific to veganism.
Main issue is the social aspect, thankfully our families have been supportive but kids tend to bring up a lot of underlying sentiments and emotions, and managing that could be tricky especially once our kid is a bit older.
The other minor thing is allergies. Research seems to point to introducing allergens early in life to reduce allergies forming. Seeing as she will be growing up in a world where exposure to milk, eggs fish etc is pretty common we’d like to reduce the likelihood of her having severe reactions to these, but obviously that means we would have to feed her animal products :/