VegMoms

Wednesday’s Vegan Kids: Encourage your child’s pride in his or her vegan lifestyle. Here are some fun ways you can support that:

1) Buy her a cool veg-message T-shirt or bag from PETA’s catalog online.

2) Offer a great vegan snack he can take to call.

3) Visit a farm sanctuary, and help your child create a class report about it.

4) Volunteer together at an animal shelter.

5) Help her write a letter to the editor of your newspaper or a kids’ magazine about why she’s vegan and why others should consider it, too.

6) Help him get politically active by writing letters to politicians about law changes.

7) Let her choose a veg-positive bumper sticker for the family car (or her bike, guitar case, locker, etc.)

From Chapter Three of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Vegan Eating for Kids. (Photo Petacatalog.com)

Wednesday Vegan Kids … If your child declares herself vegan or vegetarian and you are carnivorous, would you support her choice? What about if you’re vegan and your child decides he wants to eat meat? Do you let him? Do you buy meat for him? These are the questions many parents on both the meat no-meat side of the equation find themselves grappling, as more kids want to go meatless, or as more parents want their families to live a veg life but may have kids who are resistant to that idea.

I discuss this sticky situation in depth in my soon-to-be released book The Complete Idiots Guide to Vegan Eating for Kids. But what’s most important to remember is whatever you choose, it’s up to you as the parent to set the tone. We can make any kind of eating a power struggle between us and our children, or an opportunity to present our beliefs in a positive way and allow them to make more choices about their own lives, especially as they grow. “May your life preach more loudly than your lips,” a popular paraphrase of St. Francis of Assisi fits well here. We can guide our children along the paths we believe are right, and they may follow in our footsteps. But I believe they have to take their own steps and make their own imprints in the world to know what path is truly right for them. I can hope they’ll follow, but I can’t walk it for them.