Are You Going To Raise Your Children Vegan?
Below is a post from dcvegan.com that I thought was a great read:
Ramblings of A Vegan Mama
Will You Raise Your Child Vegan??
That, my friends, is the most asked question of a pregnant vegan. I can’t count how many times friends, strangers and relatives asked me THAT question, with eyebrows cocked. So my response was to raise my eyebrows right back and say “Why wouldn’t I?”
It is mind boggling to me that one can look at a perfectly healthy person whose strong sense of morality rules their diet and question the fact that they will “impose” their morals and habits on their children. My hackles rose at the mere question mentioned above–and I bit back my tongue from responding with “No–I plan on taking the child to McDonalds every day and basically shooting him up with antibiotics and hormones and insuring his future as a diabetic–also, I plan on ignoring my love of animals and my abhorance at their treatment by not teaching him that what most of society is mindlessly consuming was once a living, breathing creature.”
Now, don’t get me wrong–I am not going to put Benjamin to sleep every night with stories of factory farming–I don’t even want him to really know about that particular horror until he’s old enough to process it. What I want to do is teach him to respect, on a very basic level, his fellow living creatures by taking an extremely simple action–not eating them.
I am going to do what every parent strives to do–my best at raising my child in my own individual way.
I think that we put too much faith into our pediatricians, into magazines, into parenting books, into OTHER people to raise our children for us. THEY THEY THEY. There are so many books, articles, suggestions, “rights” and “wrongs” to this parenting thing…and “they” are apparently the experts.
I think people need to think for themselves–whether it’s the parent who decides on the alternative vaccine schedule or the person who decides to let his child sleep on her side instead of her back every other night or the mother who decides to raise her child vegan not just because she thinks it’s morally correct but because she knows it will be beneficial to his health in this world of ten thousand un-pronouncable, god-knows-where-it-came-from ingredients.
My favorite incident happened after Benjamin was born–a family friend asked huffily if we thought we were going to have a hard time finding a pediatrician who was “okay” with our child being vegan–and I looked at her and smiled really big and said “All I have to say to the person who is concerned with him being healthy is: nine pound baby at birth….’nuff said!
So, for now I’ll just do my best–and I’ll try to keep smiling and proving in a positive way that this is a HEALTHY, beautiful, peaceful way in which I’m raising my child–this vegan way.
-Megan Meinberg
Photo courtesty of Modern Mom.