We were about to dig into one of my family's favorite chicken dishes - a nice Marcella Hazan number, garlic, rosemary, good stuff - when an anxious look crossed Aislinn's face.

"What?" I asked.

"I'm a vegetarian!" she, then 11, blurted out.

"Not tonight, you're not!" I blurted back.

The next day, we revisited the issue. She came prepared. "What about your health?" I asked. She whipped out books on how growing children could safely go vegetarian.

"But you don't even like vegetables all that much," I argued.

She promised to try.

My biggest fear was harder to clear. My husband and I both work full time. We barely manage to pull off a good dinner seven nights a week for ourselves and our three girls. Were we now talking multiple entrees? What did I look like? A caterer?

Aislinn just looked at me with those brown eyes of hers:

"I'll help."

Nearly a year has passed. Aislinn is indeed a vegetarian, and I have not been reduced to kitchen slave. Having a vegetarian kid in an otherwise meat-eating household has proved to be quite doable. In fact, we've discovered great dishes we probably wouldn't have if not for this veggie thing.

My kid is not unique. According to a 2005 poll conducted for the Vegetarian Resource Group, an estimated 3 percent, or 1.4 million, American 8- to 18- year-olds are vegetarian.

While VRG doesn't have the data to prove there has been an increase in kid vegetarians, consumer research manager John Cunningham said he believes the number has grown, in part because of more acceptance by society.

"Ten, 15 years ago, a parent would have just forced the kid to eat meat," he said.

Some kids don't like meat. But vegetarianism is also hot with lots of preteens and teenagers for moral, ethical and health reasons. When your child goes to the trouble of researching the nasty things done to animals en route to our tables and then commits to changing behavior so he or she is not supporting inhuman treatment, it's hard not to support that.

In addition, vegetarian diets can be associated with good things like lower body mass and decreased risk of heart disease and diabetes.

At the same time, you don't want your children to suffer some weird nutritional deficiency. As a parent, it's important to teach your children how to eat properly so that doesn't happen.

Take proteins. Meat and fish contain so-called complete proteins. Plant foods don't. Vegetarians need to eat a variety of protein sources - legumes, nuts, seeds, soy products, eggs and dairy, according to Dawn Jackson Blatner, a spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association. But they don't need to be combined at the same meal, as previously believed.

Young vegetarians also need to make sure they're getting enough calcium, iron and Vitamin B12.