Is there anything you and your partner cannot agree on?

[Kona84]

Just wondering if there is anything in regards to raising the baby that you and your partner cannot agree?

For me it’s the baby’s diet.
I have been a vegetarian for 18 years more than half my life. I want the baby to be vegetarian until they are old enough to choose to eat meat.

My partner wants the baby to eat meat until they decide they want to be vegetarian.

I am worried about cooking meat that I can’t try before feeding the baby.
I know lots of vegetarian children that are thriving and I don’t see any negative points.
When I look at meat I just negatives, negative for the planet and health.

What does your partner eat?

I've just started weaning again and have found it easier for a lot of the first foods to be vegetables. We eat meat in this house so if dd has some it will be because we're eating it otherwise I boil some veg up for her.

I think it's best not to take anything off the table, you don't know what kind of eater your dc will be. But I don't think it's fair that you have to prepare meat if you don't want to.

Presumably you’ll be doing the majority of weaning the baby while you’re on maternity leave, so not only does it not make any sense to feed your baby meat, it would be positively dangerous to feed him/her meat you can’t taste yourself to check it’s fully cooked etc.

Why don’t you cook vegetarian food for the baby and your Dh can cook meat?

We are mostly on the same page. I’m stricter than he is. He’d let her get away with murder whereas I’m keen for my DD to follow rules & have consequences.. such as if you won’t put your winter coat on, we aren’t going to the park. Whereas my OH would just let her go with the thin summer jacket she wants to wear (and then complain she’s miserable & cold).

Re-veggie.. I’d go into weaning with an open mind. Yes, children can absolutely thrive on a vegetarian diet however, toddlers are notoriously picky. And you may run the risk of them getting very little protein etc! My daughter currently hates vegetables & no chance she’s eating things like chickpeas, lentils etc! & you may think, oh that won’t be us.. so did I. I weaned my child on a home cooked, wide range of foods complete with all the fruit & veg. My other half & I love food, cooking & eat healthily. But she just suddenly stopped liking anything around her second birthday. And we are still battling to get her to eat properly again!

Would you both compromise at pescatarian? My veggie friend does offer fish to her child as a guaranteed protein source as he’s hit & miss with eating! Or sway towards veggie but if he wants to try meat of someone else’s plate, then that’s ok?

I'm having a baby on my own and although there are obviously challenging aspects to that, quite frankly one of the upsides is that my choice in things is what goes.

I'm also vegetarian, so obviously anything I feed my baby in the early stages will be along those lines. However I'm leaning towards the idea that in other contexts (visits to friends, any situation with a buffet, possibly also nursery) I won't be attempting to prise meat out of its hands should it happen to want to eat some. I'm not sure that I can be doing with attempting to prevent my uncomprehending small child from eating a sausage roll at a friend's birthday party on the grounds that I don't consider meat environmentally responsible - I suspect that wouldn't play out all that well. So I think what will probably happen initially is a vegetarian-at-home, flexible-elsewhere setup until it's old enough to have some concept of what we're talking about.

So much but then it’s a huge learning curve for everyone. He was very indulgent and couldn’t bear seeing them upset or hear them cry - even if they’d just been told off or were tired and scratchy. I had to wait until he went away for four days to sleep train because he would have been unable to cope with it despite knowing it needed to happen.
I’m quite fussy about the food and drink they had but he’d give them sips of Diet Coke from about three and allowed them to have it from about five which I got very cross with. They all drink it still despite now understanding it strips calcium from the bones. He also sneaked them to McDonalds occasionally and introduced them to chicken nuggets without me knowing.
Even now they are adults he still tries to make everything perfect for them. The youngest WhatsApp messages him with a doe eyed picture and he pings her money for a meal out. He regularly pays our sons parking tickets rather than let him take responsibility. We disagree on that.

Yes I have said I would compromise on fish.

I’m vegan and my partner is a meat eater, although he happily eats mostly vegan at home and only occasionally will cook himself sausages or something. We’ve so far agreed that the baby will eat a mostly vegan diet while at home, and if it gets some non vegan things when out and about it’s not the end of the world.

I'm veggie, have been for 20 years, and my husband is a meat eater. We've agreed that the baby will grow up eating meat and can change their mind when they're old enough to decide. It's much harder to start eating meat when you've never had it! I also think it's a bit mean when they're at school and might start asking questions why they don't eat the same as the others - it's literally only because their parents told them not to eat it. It's certainly hard to be the odd one out as a child when you're too young to understand how it all works.

We will eat a lot of veggie meals together as a family but maybe things like roast dinner they can have meat with their dad. It doesn't mean they'll have meat every single day.