It's just a personal decision at the end of the day. You cannot possibly provide a child with equal access to every possible permutation of life choices available. Most people do what they think is best for their child according to what they believe.
But what if it's something else? What if she believes that hitting other children is okay. Would you attempt to brainwash her in to believing it's not or let her carry on with her belief?
Vegetarian diets are not healthy. It tastes like crap, you lose muscle mass from lack of protein. High protein vegetables have even larger amount of carbs anyway. They also make you fart all day until you eventually shit your pants and die.
I'm not convinced of your dietary advice given your fondness for a bacon based diet. I think you're on the payroll of the Pork Council.
The basic principle behind eating is obtaining nutrition for your physical health. The fact of the matter is that the nutrition available in meat/dairy can be found in alternate food sources. Therefore, it doesn't make any sense to claim that children following a vegetarian or vegan diet are being limited in any real way. An analogy would be if one parent had their child take piano lessons and the other had their child learn the drums. Both are providing general musical learning, but they're not the same instruments. Would it make sense to claim that learning the piano represented freedom for the child and learning the drums represented deprivation?
I am afraid that analogy doesn't work unless the parents are forcing the child to learn which again falls under the category of arsehole parents. If you force a child to do something chances are they will grow up to hate it, its better to let them decide what they want to do and what they enjoy doing. Hopefully this also applies to kids forced to be vegans and they one day go mental, cook a load of bacon and fill their parents bed with it for being bastards.
Okay, say the parents are vegetarian. That means that the food they put in front of their child is not going to include meat. The child then chooses the types of vegetarian food that they prefer. How is that any different than parents that include meat among the choices? Like I've said, meat is really just a different form of the same kind of nutrition. You can't claim you're depriving the child of anything just because the choice of protein sources doesn't include meat.
But the minute you you decide your child cannot eat meat/dairy because you are vegan you are forcing your lifestyle upon said child. That child never chose to be a vegan, it was forced up it.
But why should the child not be aloud to chose to eat meat? I think I said before we had a woman at work who refused to let her husband cook meat in their oven and when they had a child made sure it only ate a vegetarian diet. Its a form of oppression. Always give children the choice.
The minute you decide your child should eat meat and dairy you're forcing it on them. There's a lot of evidence for the harm both can cause. A healthy diet can include them. But of course a vegan diet can also be good. Do you think someone who is Muslim or Jewish is also guilty of the same because they don't offer a superSONIC based dietary option?
But you don't decide, you put the food on a plate and they choose to eat it or leave it. My daughter doesn't like milk so we don't give it to her, she chose not to drink milk, we didn't forcibly deny her it. Actually I do but more so because I don't believe anyone should have religion forced upon them. I don't believe in any of that old crap but Mrs Grim has her beliefs, however she agrees with me that our daughter should be aloud to make up her own mind and she isn't taught that any religious beliefs are right or wrong.
It doesn't make any difference whether meat is a choice or not. Meat is just one of many forms of protein available for healthy nutrition in modern society. I think what you've really done with your own child is no different than what a vegetarian does. You haven't provided every possible food combination on the planet for your child to choose from. You've provided a reasonable range of them and then find that your child prefers some of them over others.
So what happens when that child is old to make its own decisions, say 13 and wants to eat meat but the parents 'forbid' it because being vegetarians/vegans themselves they see it as wrong. Do you think that is right?
Parents make lots of decisions based on what they think is best for their child. As I said earlier, it's impossible to offer a child all possible options that are available. I find people who give toddlers or younger fast food/junk food on a regular basis to be far worse than any militant vegan stereotype.
So what happens when that child is old to make its own decisions, say 13 and wants to avoid meat but the parents 'forbid' it because being meat eaters themselves they see it as wrong. Do you think that is right? Your butcher family roots are showing I reckon. You're probably eating a bag of hoofs now.
No I don't, like I said earlier in the thread if my daughter chose not to eat meat then I would have no right to stop her. I don't force my world views onto my daughter and neither does my wife.
What happens is that they'll probably eat vegetarian at home and then not eat vegetarian at school. I don't really see that as a big deal. That type of scenario occurs regardless. Parents have certain types of dishes that they prefer, and the kid gets tired of them or has parents that want to eat healthy and the kid wants to eat junk food all the time etc.