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 just appreciated that your coworker is catholic. That means they definitely gave a catholic guilt button. A lot of antivegan attitude, dressed up as social concern like this or otherwise, is just an expression of people’s own guilt about the contradiction between what they know about what they eat and their self image as a Good Person. If you shift the terrain of the discussion away from peer pressure etc and onto more solid ground (I want to raise my child with strong morals, veganism is a strong part of my morals, cruelty to animals is clearly immoral) then you’re either going to reach this person or get them to shut the fuck up. This criticism of you is clearly a reflection of their own insecurity, so the more you can turn this around on them the better.