Is it wrong to want to raise my children vegetarian like myself, then let them decide when they are old to know choice if they want to eat meat? originally appeared on Quora - the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.
Answer by Miranda Marcus on Quora:
When I was 4 years old, my family stopped eating meat.
Like millions of people around the world, not eating meat is fine for kids.
However, the result was that when I grew up, I had developed a psychological block towards eating meat. This, I find to be unnecessarily limiting in my lifestyle and essentially removed my ability to choose for myself.
My daughter is 5 and I encourage her to eat everything, though it turns out she is a picky eater like me. I think it’s better if I don’t impose my own ideas about what makes good food on her, because I want her to be able to try new things with an open mind - this is so hard to do, though. But I try.
However, despite being picky, she does love chicken nuggets. She’s had chickens (given to her as a birthday gift when she was 4), we’ve raised chicks, and she’s seen their dead bodies when some local predator got to them. My husband took that opportunity to show her how the tendons work in an amputated chicken wing that remained in the coop.
She knows that chicken nuggets come from chickens like the cute ones we had that she got to hug and pet and raise. This knowledge has not dissuaded her from loving chicken nuggets at all.
So, by all means, get some chickens, raise them, let them be brutally murdered by local predators, show her the bloody remains, and teach your daughter about the cycle of life. Just don’t expect it to have the result you’re hoping for.
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