From the category archives:

Education

Vegan children, meaty world: dealing with overlap

March 3, 2010

This week’s question to the Council of Vegan Parents actually spanned two weeks of puzzles! While we’ve got over 30 parents on the Council now, some problems are still common enough that it’s hard to find examples of problems and solutions that worked.

(And of course, that’s a cue for another call for volunteers!)

Council member Julie was looking for some help with balancing vegan values with “stuff happens” in the eyes of a small child, after having a few issues with her son freaking out after accidental contact with animal products – the kinds of things an adult could easily shrug off, but for a three year old, it’s like the world just ended, which prompted the question of how to manage things when your child doesn’t mesh well with a non-vegan world.

As a related followup, Dean was wondering how other parents explained where animal products come from without scaring the kids or creating the impression that mommy is a murderer or grandpa is a flesh-eating killer. While it can be easy enough to frame the “why vegan?” question to a young child, doing it in a way that doesn’t suggest that omnivorous family and friends are bad people can be a different game entirely.

We ended up combining the two questions, which sparked a lot of interesting ideas! Let’s take a look at how other members of the Council of Vegan Parents addressed things:

Talk talk talk talk talk

By far, most of the advice given this week was about having extended conversations that are age appropriate, and also doing a little extra work to remind kids to be polite and not tell everyone they’re wrong (though from the stories we recieved, it looks like lectures from children are pretty common, and hey, I’m not so sure that’s a bad thing :)

Kristie “explains, gently, that meat, dairy cheese, cow’s milk, etc., come from animals, and we don’t eat animals, we love animals, just like we love mommy and daddy and other family members.” She’s in a mixed household, but the “is daddy a bad person because he eats animals” question hasn’t come up yet.

Kim goes with this approach: “we say some people eat meat, some people don’t. We talk about why we don’t use food, leather, etc. from animals in a positive way. It’s better for animals, better for us, better for the earth kind of thing. But we always say that it’s really important to be polite and not hurt people’s feelings. So now instead of saying ‘OH GROSS!!!’ and completely freaking out when family members eat meat, my kids say ‘We love animals, we don’t eat them.’ Sometimes they throw in “we don’t kill them and eat them” but still… We try to encourage our kids to lead by example rather than lecturing, but with little guys some lecturing happens :) ”

Linda’s 4 1/2 year old is entering a stage where she’ll ask why anyone would eat animals: “I usually just explain that most people grow up eating that way. I tell her it’s hard for some people to change the way they eat. Then I tell her how lucky we are for knowing not to eat animals in the first place. This seems fine for her at this point.”

Rebecca generally falls back on “we wouldn’t do this in our home, but they do it (in theirs, at school, etc.) and, while we’re sad about their choice, we can’t force them to change their behavior. People learn and change at their own pace. If they ask us questions about being vegan, then we can answer them.”

Al’s already written up a great blog post about some of his daughter’s experiences and conversations that you really need to check out directly – it’ll really get your mind working!

Focus on things in common

One approach Julie’s been having success with is to focus on how much her family has in common with non-veg family and friends. As she puts it, her son “was ecstatic when he figured out that ‘cow people’ can eat vegan food, too, and that grandpa can eat tofu and beans and (insert random favorite-food-of-the-week here) just like we can, because vegan food is ok for everyone to eat.”

Julie finds that various “course corrections” are helpful: “We still get some pushback from him; he’ll say that he hates people who ‘are cow’ (‘hate’ is apparently a favorite word when you’re three – lots of strong emotions and not enough words to describe them all!) We’ve had a lot of talks about how he doesn’t hate grandma; he loves grandma and wishes that grandma was vegan like he is.”

Teach by example

Children are great at mimicking your behaviour (good and bad!) so simply being yourself and providing good examples can go a long way.

Meredith says “I think he’s probably learning to do what I do with family, just ignore the bad stuff (meat-eating and relatives who hunt) while enjoying the good stuff (playing games, watching movies, laughing at silly old photos from gatherings past).”

Understand the brain

Jacob didn’t have an example from his own life, but he did pass on a helpful podcast from This American Life (it was in episode 400, “Stories Pitched by our Parents.”, but apparently only in the podcast version, which is confusing the crap out of me so if someone could please post a link in the comments along with a time marker, it’d be a big help…)

In it, they explain that some kinds of upper level reasoning simply aren’t possible for a young child whose frontal cortex hasn’t developed. The example in that case was a child who couldn’t understand someone who was Jewish but also celebrated Christmas. In her mind, the definition of Judaism was “someone who doesn’t celebrate Christmas” and the resulting paradox was more than she could figure out.

Jacob suggested that both incidental contact and cases where family members eat animals are things that a child can’t work out if, for example, “being vegan” means “being a good person” and then the alternative is, clearly, unfathomable.

It’s also important to realize that the idea of death takes a while to fully understand, so the concept of killing animals might not mean as much as the idea of eating like Mommy and/or Daddy do. Killing might be understood as “a bad thing” but the actual details take a while to sink in – while it’s for humans, I found this resource helpful while researching this topic.

Further reading

Steph picked out a few points from Joanne Stepaniak’s “Raising Vegetarian Children” that are worth considering:

  • The best approach is the honest one – it will depend on your circumstances, age of the kids, etc.
  • Just because some people eat meat, doesn’t make them “bad” – they may just be unaware, or unable to change
  • Some people practice their ethics through food, others do it in other ways – charitable acts, etc

As for books you can enjoy with your child, Al gave this recommendation: “the book That’s Why We Don’t Eat Animals was Anna’s first exposure to the treatments of animals. I edit the book as I’m reading it, taking the ‘factory’ part out of the farm and making it more about use and less about treatment (because even animals who are treated well still shouldn’t be raised and killed for human consumption). The illustrations in that book are, I think, age appropriate. They drive home the point without traumatizing the kids.”

What about you? Has your child acted out due to the nonvegan actions of others, or “accidents”? How did you handle it? Let us know in the comments so we all can grow together!

Thanks to Jacob, Elaine, Julie, Dean, Al, Kristie, Meredith, Kim, Steph, Dilip, Rebecca, and Linda for their help on this one!

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Dealing with mass media farming propaganda

January 21, 2010

Im going to say this is hour 39 of the marathon. Photo by Diego Cupolo

I'm going to say this is hour 39 of the marathon. Photo by Diego Cupolo

This week at SpawnBetter, we tackle a question from reader Melanie, who’s getting a little tired of the way farming is represented on children’s programming.

“In between the cartoons they show on nickjr they have little bits they play instead of commercials, mostly little songs or games. However, when watching with my son the other day, a little video came on between shows about a turkey farm.

“The video seemed to portray the message that turkeys enjoy being on the farm (which is really just a gigantic metal shed), that heat lamps are ‘just like being under its mother’s wing, that eating and eating and eating all day so they can be ready for thanksgiving is what they love to do.’ It even showed images of the turkeys so packed in that warehouse that they couldn’t even move. It shows how fans in the warehouse keep them cool as they grow cause, uh, you know, they never get to leave that shed until they are sent to slaughter.

“Do they really need to expose young children to scenes of large factory farms that have been sugar coated to hide their cruelty?”

Thanks Melanie! In answer to your question, yes, they probably really do need to sugar coat things, or we’d see the agriculture industry collapse overnight! In a world where Sesame Street is sponsored by McDonalds (et tu, Grover?) and other networks run commercials during childrens programming, there are definitely a few layers of interests that need to get met before we even get to the needs of your child!

I asked the Council of Vegan Parents what they do to mitigate the propaganda, and they have a few strategies that might help:

Talk things through. Overwhelmingly the top response, several Council members gave some sample dialogues they’ve had with their kids after something ridiculous comes up on the screen.

I learn more and more with every week’s question, but the world of childrens programming is still pretty new for me, so I don’t know if the NickJr segment Melanie’s talking about is by Buck Howdy, but this conversation from Pippi seems like a good fit:

Kid: Mom look at all the turkeys!
Mom: Oh yes, how sad.
Kid: Why is that sad?
Mom: How would you feel if you were taken away from your mommy & daddy, locked in a big shed with no sunshine, no fresh air, no where to poo or pee, crammed in so tight you couldn’t move & fed something you didn’t like?
Kid: (sad look of confusion)
Mom: (Not wanting to add more details about how these turkeys came from parents who had to be hand manipulated to ejaculate & inseminate because of their gross genetic modification, or how humans are known to punch & kick these creatures ‘just for fun’, or how horrendous the conditions are during their transportation and inhumane slaughter, no need to continue….) I gently add that these turkeys are in that shed so that man (farmer) can make them fat to kill and sell for people to eat. Birds, including turkeys do not like to be locked inside. They like to be with their families, chasing bugs and digging in the dirt like the chickens and ducks and geese and swans we met at Peaceful Prairie Sanctuary.
Kid: (smiling) We don’t eat birds, do we mom?
Mom: (proud) nope!
Kid: Buck Howdy should let those turkey’s go.

Here’s another conversation from Celeste, after watching something on Sesame Street involving eggs:

“They were promoting eating them and made it look fun with music and brightly colored pictures. Of course the farm was pictured as the tradition small farm with only a few animals, which were outside and happy. When it came on, I thought it best to address it then and there.

“I talked about it simply since my son is only 3. Since we’ve talked about eggs before, I asked him what was inside the eggs. He replied excitedly “baby birds!” Then I asked him if we ate them, and he said no. He then added they would be sad if we ate them. The last part he came up with on his own, as I’ve determined sharing all the details of factory farming inappropriate for his age. I was proud he was able to make that connection on his own. As he gets older, we will continue to talk about it and tailor it to be age-appropriate.”

This seems like a common tactic among council members, but what about stuff that’s not on TV, or that your children see when you’re not around? How can you disarm these scenarios? Kari has some tips:

Keep the conversation going. Kari says she goes through a “disarming” process pretty much every day. She and her son substitute vegan food words (soy milk, veggie burger, etc) for meat and dairy words in books they read or songs they sing.

Be careful how you frame the issues though – it’s a complicated topic to get across in simple points, and as Kari notes, “It’s a fine line when talking to young children and trying to get across a non-maintream point without making people that do drink cow’s milk or eat meat look like evil doers… We try to arm our child with all the information about nutrition and treatment of animals that he can handle at each stage of his life and we try to do it in a way that doesn’t make non-vegan’s seem bad because we don’t think that will help and it’s not a part of our family values.”

Lastly, Kari keeps books like Victor the Vegetarian and That’s Why We Don’t Eat Animals: A Book About Vegans, Vegetarians, and All Living Things around to counteract some of the mainstream media spin.

All these strategies sound amazing, but I can’t miss out on a chance to quote from War Games: “Sometimes the only way to win is not to play.” And so:

Limit/control the exposure. Al is able to monitor everything his daughter watches, and limits her to one movie or program a day. Meanwhile, Julie’s family takes control in a different route by not owning a TV.

Of course, in this century “not owning a TV” usually means the opposite of the, well, I’m gonna say hippie connotations of a decade or more ago, and media consumption can be even greater through the use of DVDs, downloads, and internet streams. The difference here is that there’s usually fewer commercials, and you generally have a better idea of what you’re going to be exposed to, with the option to pre-screen.

Finally, Al has some tips on treating the disease instead of the symptoms:

Complain. Al mentioned that he’s thinking about writing a formal letter to Sesame Street, and I think it might do some good (along with raising public awareness of things like the McDonalds sponsorship, which I know surprised everyone I told,) but it’s important to pick your battles carefully. For an ongoing show like Sesame Street it’s possible that the messaging will be tweaked according to public input, but most cartoons are created a season at a time and then resold around the world for years, so once they’re created, they’re not likely to change until they go out of favour with the audience and then they simply disappear from the schedule.

A huge thank you to Council members Kari, Steph, Julie, Celeste, Al, and Pippi for helping out with this week’s question, and also to Melanie for asking it!

What about you? Is there a show that drives you crazy? Are you putting your kids on a TV diet? How are you handling the propaganda built into programming, the ads, and also through print, billboards, etc? Let us know in the comments!

(Photo by Diego Cupolo)

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