Hi,Can anyone tell me a little about how your child/children feel about being vegan - how much do they focus on it and how does it affect them?
If anything, I think my 7 year old is proud of it...
'Demand?'... Since I wouldn't have been giving eg. meat to a someone's vegetarian child if I was a meat eater (or bacon to a Muslim child), I expect them to. I also find it natural that they do, just like I wouldn't have been giving meat to someone else's vegan child if I would have been a meat eater. Most people understand this without a problem.Do you demand that other parents (when they visit friends or go to birthday parties) and caretakers (such as grandparents) only serve vegan food to your child/children?
Never. Not from doctors (not that he has been sick), dentists (he never had any holes), from kindergarten, friends, school or family. Not one single time.Do you experience critique from doctors and other caretakers?
Since some people have a tendency to be 'unknownists', and blame all sorts of issues on the element in a situation they don't know much about, maybe I would if he wouldn't have been a healthy, happy guy - but no. On the contrary, I think vegan children serve as a good examples for others - and show that kids don't need animal products - except, of course, the extremely few cases that has gotten media coverage because some people assume that if a vegan child is ill, it's because he doesn't eat animal products/because they don't understand that there unfortunately will be some non-vegan and vegan kids that are raised by parents not knowing anything about nutrition, or are too ignorant to take care of their children, like the story about the 'vegan' mother who one morning over breakfast, "suddenly looked at her daughter and realised things weren't right. When Lizzie smiled, Paige suddenly noticed her upper front teeth were pitted with holes." The daughter with holes in her teeth got a lot of press coverage, my son with no holes in his hasn't got any.
It must be kind of embarrassing to use holes in your kids teeth as a way to document that vegan can't be healthy, both because there are sites out there about the same person explaining about all the milk she used, because it's kind of strange to 'suddenly' find out that your child's teeth were 'pitted with holes' (where were they looking during all the previous meals?), and because there are so many healthy vegan children out there without the problems eg. this woman try to blame on vegan diet.
I don't see why they would (except for the above mentioned 'unknownism', which I choose not to worry about), but if I would have attempted to adopt kids and heard such comments, I'd just have showed them stuff like this:Does anyone know if being a vegan and planning to raise the child vegan becomes an issue with the adoption agency? Do they consider it a health hazard?
http://www.dietitians.ca/news/downlo...sition2000.pdf (Position of the American Dietetic Association and Dietitians of Canada: Vegetarian diets).
Or show them this thread, about all the nutrient deficiencies among non-vegans. Or a thread about the links between animal products and cancer, and ask if they consider feeding children with a diet that's so often associated with arthritis, diabetes, cancer, heart disease and all sorts of other problems less of a 'health hazard'.
I don't see why they would; if they know something about nutrition...Do they consider it a health hazard?
They should rather consider not feeding their kids a proper diet free from all those products that so often as linked with various serious health problems as health hazard.
It's rather ironic; an average person living on a non-vegan diet is ill 7-10 years of his life, according to various studies. The main founder of the vegan movement became 95, was trekking in the mountains until he was 92, never took any medicine, and many people eat vegan for health reasons alone, but still: some people are more worried about the health aspects of vegan food than a standard diet - a diet that even the most conservative health authorities are trying to influence in the direction of less meat and animal fats, more plants (read: more antioxidants, more fiber, less cholesterol, more phyto-chemicals and folate etc.).... they assume meat and dairy is necessary in spite of the existence of millions healthy people who don't use these products.
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