Raising Vegetarian Kids

Dear vegetarian mother,

I hear your inner conflict which comes through as you contradict yourself. You say you want your son to choose for himself freely, but you also want to control his path of choice and stir it toward being vegetarian. You may fool yourself to believe that it gives him the most freedom to choose, but it doesn’t.

To truly let your son choose means to do nothing and let life unfold. Your husband can serve him meat when he is ready. No natural society is vegetarian, and so by nature, a boy sees hunting as part of life and does not perceive a problem with it. If you have your son be vegetarian first, his free choice is out the window. You are shaping his choice by manipulating; fist his habit, then his mind (showing him where it comes from in, most likely, an emotional way.)

There is no problem with your plan other than honesty. You can just say, “I want my son to have a greater chance of being vegetarian,” and then carry out your plan. However, if you truly want him to choose, let life unfold without your control. 

My husband and I were vegan and then vegetarian with our first child. As it turned out, this did harm to his health in spite our meticulous food combining and knowledge. Finally, when he was seven, after a blood test and a vegetarian naturopathic doctor’s recommendations, we introduced small amounts of organic meat, and within three days we had a new child. This is not true for every child, but, ideally your son should choose based on his own body guidance without emotional ideological input. 

It shouldn’t be too hard to convince your husband to stop bringing home any unhealthy food, and instead eat real organic, grass-fed meat, and wild caught fish, ideally not even cooked. Other than making this change, let life unfold and trust that your son will chose what is right for him, not based on anyone’s ideology, but on his own body. A young child chooses based on taste and body need, not politics or emotions. 

I don’t know how you eat, but the vegan and vegetarian industry is doing an incredible harm to our health and to the planet with endless production, packaging and transportation of processed artificial and unhealthy foods. The way to really heal the planet in terms of eating is to eat raw, local, and eat the food without any processing, not even cooking. As we process food by cooking and making concoctions that require

fire, electricity, hot water, garbage, packaging etc, we pollute the world for both humans and animals. 

Warmly, http://authenticparent.com/index.html