When Compassion Gets Called Indoctrination
A never-ending critique of vegan parenting
Children learn how to gut and skin rattlesnakes at the Sweetwater Rattlesnake Roundup in Sweetwater, Texas, USA, 2015. Photo: Jo-Anne McArthur / We Animals.
I have always known that veganism makes people uncomfortable.
At its simplest, my veganism is an attempt to live as though other animals are not objects. It is a daily, imperfect refusal to treat their pain as trivial, their bodies as resources, their families as irrelevant, or their lives as automatically less important because they are not human.
That discomfort is not surprising. Veganism interrupts habits most of us were raised inside. It asks questions about food, entertainment, clothing, family traditions, holidays, and institutions that often feel ordinary because they have been ordinary for so long.
But “ordinary” is not the same as neutral.
Every household teaches values. Parents, schools, churches, television, birthday parties, holiday meals, zoo field trips—all of it communicates a worldview. Chicken nuggets, leather shoes, fishing trips, cartons of milk, and animal attractions do too.
The only difference is that some worldviews are so normalized they become invisible.
A child can be taught that cows, pigs, chickens, and fishes are food, and that monkeys in cages are entertainment, and this will be treated as normal childhood. A child can be taken to a zoo and taught to call captivity education. A child can be served the body of an animal and taught to call it dinner. A child can be handed a glass of milk and never told anything about the mother or baby it came from.
That is not neutrality. It is a belief system with cultural power behind it.
The social psychologist Melanie Joy calls this “carnism”: the largely invisible ideology that conditions people to see some animals as companions and others as consumable. Whether or not one uses that exact term, the basic point is hard to avoid. Dominant beliefs often do not feel like beliefs. They feel like common sense.
Veganism, by contrast, has to announce itself. It has to explain why it is opting out. It has to justify refusing what everyone else has agreed not to question. Because it disrupts the comfort of the ordinary, it is often accused of being rigid, judgmental, dramatic, or extreme.
But there is nothing extreme about telling children that animals can suffer.
There is nothing extreme about saying that a mother cow has an interest in her baby, that a fish has an interest in continuing to live, or that a monkey in a cage is not an attraction. These are not fringe claims. They are ordinary moral observations once we stop treating species membership as a permission slip.
Animal ethics has wrestled with these questions for decades. Tom Regan argued that animals are “subjects-of-a-life,” with their own experiences and claims. Lori Gruen, Clare Palmer, Martha Nussbaum, and others have examined what humans owe animals not only because they can suffer, but because we create relationships of dependency, confinement, vulnerability, and control. Contemporary work in animal ethics increasingly emphasizes relational responsibility and justice, not just abstract calculations of harm.
In other words, concern for animals is not a psychological oddity. It is a serious moral, political, and academic field.
None of this means children should be burdened with adult despair. They should not be made responsible for fixing the world or used as messengers, soldiers, symbols, or proof. They should not be taught to hate people who make different choices or made to feel that love depends on ideological purity.
A healthy vegan household has to make those distinctions clearly.
Compassion should not function as a test of worth or a weapon against other people. It should not become a script children are expected to perform perfectly. And it should never make children feel bad for what adults serve them in another household, at school, at a birthday party, or anywhere else where children are not the ones making the decisions.
The goal is not to raise children who panic every time someone eats cheese. The goal is to raise children who can remain tender in a world that often trains them out of tenderness.
There is a difference between guilt and conscience, between shame and moral awareness, between indoctrination and age-appropriate truth-telling.
Children are allowed to have moral feelings. They are allowed to feel sad when they learn that animals are hurt, to ask why humans do the things we do, to object to cages, to say no, and to develop ethical instincts that may make adults uncomfortable.
Developmental psychology supports this. Children are not empty vessels passively filled with adult beliefs. Research in moral development, including social domain theory, shows that they actively reason about harm, fairness, authority, convention, and personal choice. Adults influence them, of course—that is part of caregiving—but children are also moral thinkers in their own right.
Adults often say they want children to be compassionate, but only within approved boundaries: be kind to dogs and cats, be gentle with butterflies, don’t hurt the frog, say sorry when you step on an ant.
But do not ask about the hamburger, the zoo, the aquarium, the milk, or why some animals are friends and others are ingredients.
When a child extends compassion beyond the lines adults have drawn, that compassion becomes inconvenient. It becomes “too much,” something to manage, minimize, or explain away.
This is where accusations of “indoctrination” often enter.
The word is powerful because nobody wants children manipulated or coerced, trapped inside an adult’s worldview without room to think, question, disagree, and become themselves.
But we should be careful about using “indoctrination” only for minority beliefs.
A child raised around Christianity is being taught values. A child raised around patriotism is being taught values. A child raised to hunt, fish, eat animals, attend rodeos, visit zoos, or see some animals as pets and others as products is being taught values. A child raised vegan is also being taught values.
The question is not whether values are being taught. They always are.
The better questions are: Are children allowed to ask questions? To disagree? To have relationships with people who live differently? Are they given information in ways they can handle? Are they loved unconditionally, protected from shame, and supported in forming their own conscience?
Those questions matter far more than whether a household’s ethics are popular.
The phrase “human supremacy” is uncomfortable because it names a hierarchy most of us were trained not to see. But naming a system is not the same as condemning every person caught within it. It is a structural critique, not a claim that every participant is personally monstrous.
It is possible to love people who participate in harmful systems. We all do. The work is not to divide the world into pure and impure people, but to stay honest about harm without surrendering our capacity for relationship.
That is what I want my children to learn: not to hate their non-vegan relatives, not to feel dirty if they eat something non-vegan, not to tie their worth to perfect adherence to any belief.
I want them to learn that love is bigger than obedience, that compassion requires courage, that being in the minority does not automatically make you wrong, that “normal” is not the same as ethical, and that they can ask hard questions and still be safe.
Children do not belong to ideologies, and they do not belong to parents. They are people. They deserve room to think, question, feel, disagree, change, and become. They also deserve adults who will not lie to them just because the truth is socially inconvenient.
So yes, some households eat plants, talk about animals as beings with their own lives, question zoos, and question the idea that human pleasure justifies animal suffering. Some households believe compassion should cross the species line.
If that is an ideology, then so is the opposite.
The difference is that veganism asks something of us. It asks us to change, to give things up, to look directly at suffering we were taught not to see, to care even when caring makes life harder.
I understand why that is threatening.
But I refuse to pretend that kindness is dangerous. And I refuse to accept that teaching children compassion is a form of harm simply because the compassion extends farther than some adults would prefer.
References and Further Readings
Diamond, C. (1978). Eating meat and eating people. Philosophy, 53(206), 465–479. doi:10.1017/S0031819100026334
Donaldson, S., & Kymlicka, W. (2011). Zoopolis: A political theory of animal rights. Oxford University Press.
Gruen, L., & Monsó, S. (2024). The moral status of animals. In E. N. Zalta & U. Nodelman (Eds.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2024 ed.). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University.
Hussar, K. M., & Harris, P. L. (2010). Children who choose not to eat meat: A study of early moral decision-making. Social Development, 19(3), 627–641. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9507.2009.00547.x
Joy, M. (2009). Why we love dogs, eat pigs, and wear cows: An introduction to carnism. Conari Press.
Loughnan, S., Haslam, N., & Bastian, B. (2010). The role of meat consumption in the denial of moral status and mind to meat animals. Appetite, 55(1), 156–159. doi:10.1016/j.appet.2010.05.043
McGuire, L., Bagus, T., Carter, A. G., Fry, E., & Faber, N. S. (2025). Reasoning to justify eating animals varies with age. Child Development, 96(3), 953–965. doi:10.1111/cdev.14217
Nussbaum, M. C. (2023). Justice for animals: Our collective responsibility. Simon & Schuster.
Palmer, C. (2010). Animal ethics in context. Columbia University Press.
Piazza, J., Simpson, V., & McGuire, L. (2023). Why children moralise harm to animals but not meat. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 27(8), 685–688. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2023.05.004
Plumwood, V. (2002). Environmental culture: The ecological crisis of reason. Routledge.
Regan, T. (1983). The case for animal rights. University of California Press.
Rothgerber, H. (2020). Meat-related cognitive dissonance: A conceptual framework for understanding how meat eaters reduce negative arousal from eating animals. Appetite, 146, Article 104511. doi:10.1016/j.appet.2019.104511
Turiel, E. (1983). The development of social knowledge: Morality and convention. Cambridge University Press.
Wilks, M., Caviola, L., Kahane, G., & Bloom, P. (2021). Children prioritize humans over animals less than adults do. Psychological Science, 32(1), 27–38. doi:10.1177/0956797620960398