Getting 3 yo raised vegan to eat meat, BTDT? - Page 2

[Lazurii]

So, update time.  Apparently ham is the gateway drug for meats.  We were invited to an Easter dinner and were sent home with a plate of leftover ham.  BuggaBoo didn't eat any at the dinner and it took him a few days, but he tried some and liked it and asked for it randomly.  Today he had some Thai chicken and asked us if our chickens were old enough to butcher.  So, complete 180* and it's making me laugh.  I told him our chickens are still laying so they're not going to be butchered yet, but if one of our hens keeps eating eggs then we'll butcher her.  He seemed excited.

So there!  I am now a Been There, Done That.  I hope this helps you guys out.

[dovey]

I'm glad that you're figuring it out and that your child seems to taking the whole transition easier than he was before.  I was just reading this thread last night and it has really made me think.

Now, we are vegans in our family or mostly vegans anyway, and we do teach our children that raising animals for food is wrong - not that it's sad, but that it is wrong to take away an animal's agency by making them into a farmed product.  The grownups in our family would eat wild animals or bugs.  We also eat food that other people throw away like cheese or sour milk or meat that someone serves us in a restaurant that would be thrown away if taken back.  We eat food that other people make for us which contains animal products.  However, these animal product eating occasions are few and far between.  Our kids rarely witness (or notice) us eating animal products.  The kids cannot make any of these distinctions about which animal products are okay in our book and which aren't; my seven year old son will not eat anything that is not vegan unless it is candy.  My three year old daughter has similar sentiments.  Non-vegan food horrifies them.  For awhile I couldn't understand why this was going on.  But reading this thread got me thinking. 

I was thinking about child development in relationship to this phenomenon, and I remembered that most of the ideas that kids internalize from their parents before about 7 years of age comes not from explanations, but is imitative.  Initially, children don't develop their own strong sense of right and wrong.  It's up to us to show them with our actions.  And they want to be shown clearly!  When kids are little, it can be scary to percieve an ethical gray area (i.e. Killing animals to eat them must be always right or always wrong.)   So I was thinking OP, that perhaps your son was having such a strong reaction because he saw a contradiction in his ethical stance.  He couldn't understand why all of a sudden what was wrong became something that was right.  So maybe if you don't talk a lot about your reasoning for changing your mind about eating meat (i.e. answer his questions simply, but don't go into the details), and then just model your own set of ethics in your daily life, then the road will be easier.