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• Classic-Fiction

You mention casually to the friend that the grapes and crackers are perfect, thank you, and you and your child are vegan. Your child gets to eat, no one is offended, and you’ve given your friend a tip to keep the cheese in the fridge next time your child comes to play. Then you serve him a sandwich when you get home. That’s the BPO.

Creating incremental change in your child’s diet comes naturally by first and foremost setting an example with your own. Make vegan eating easy and enticing for your child by providing yummy vegan favorite foods at home. Be true to your child’s current stage of development and social needs by being as prepared and as nonconfrontational as possible. In a pinch, keep the BPO in mind.

Media Pressure

Inevitably, your child is going to hear mixed (or just plain wrong) messages about veganism in the media. When they watch or read a story about someone who’s vegan, the adjectives strict or militant will often be attached. The media often portrays vegans as uptight, angry, judgmental, animal-rights-obsessed college kids or punk anarchists who don’t yet understand the “real world.” On the flip side, the media sometimes likes to glamorize the perfectly vegan movie star, singer, or athlete blessed with a personal chef, 100-acre organic farm, and 25 adopted rescue dogs.

Does your family resemble any of these vegan stereotypes, negative or positive? It’s important to counter images of perfection with realistic views of what real-life vegan family living means to your family.

It’s also important to arm your kids with correct information for when the naysayers descend, which they will. Casual discussions about veganism sometimes deteriorate into armchair quarterbacks playing the hypocrisy card, pointing out the inconsistencies of vegans who are just doing their level best to live more consciously in a nonvegan world: What if you wear leather? Or take medications derived from animals? Aren’t you killing plants to eat them? Crops grown in organic fertilizers aren’t really vegan, are they? Plastics, which are derived from oil, which is derived from dinosaurs, aren’t technically vegan, are they?

This line of questioning can be exhausting for adult vegans and confusing for kids who haven’t been given fair warning that it’s bound to happen.

The Debate Continues

Even within the veg community, the “us versus them” debates continue. Angry letters to editors of vegan magazines challenge purist arguments with the question: am I not vegan enough for you?The debate about whether honey is acceptable in a vegan diet also continues. (Some say excluding insect products like honey from the vegan diet trivializes the arguments about animal suffering; others believe including any animal product at all clouds the definition.)

No doubt, a lot of the options mentioned in this chapter will rile more than one or two people, as does even just the mention of the term vegan enough. For some, that’s like saying someone is kind of pregnant. Either you are, or you aren’t. That’s a debate for another book.

While it’s an important debate in the vegan movement at large, this approach may be counterproductive for most kids because kids need more leeway, time, and exceptions to purist rules than adults do. If you stay flexible, creative, and positive, there’s a much better chance your child will enjoy vegan eating and make it her own, not just what her family does.

More and more veg-positive media aimed at kids is coming online all the time, as well as in books, in movies, and in other sources. (You’ll find many listed in Appendix B.) Talking to people about why you like being vegan or sharing delicious food in your child’s classroom or at his birthday party is also a useful way to show the benefits of a vegan family lifestyle. The positive ways to spread the vegan message often use fewer debating words and more delicious food—and are much more effective in the end.

That’s So Vegan

One of the best veg-positive media resources for kids currently available is Petakids.com.