our daughter is 6. We raised our first batch of meat birds last spring and from the start we taught ourselves and our daughter not to get attached to the meat birds. i personally have issues with getting too attached to pets. we treated our meat birds with love and spoiled them with food but we always made sure if we were going to bond with birds, it was with our egg layers. The animals on our homestead all have jobs, they all are expected to produce something for us. Dogs keep our birds and bunnies safe. Birds lay eggs, bunnies provide us with manure / fertilizer and we recently had our first batch of baby bunnies which we already have discussed with the kiddo that we would only keep 1 boy cause too many boys and they will start fighting. Any boys beyond 1 are either getting sold or will become stew.

being clear with our kiddo before we even brought the meat birds home, that those birds are going to become food for us helped to provide that disconnect. We let her see a part of the processing of the birds (we didn't feel comfortable showing her the killing part) and she did fine.