Helping
Kids Care for the Earth: Ideas for Earth Day and Beyond
by:
Jamie Jefferson
Earth
Day is April 22, and while it's important to get involved on this day,
there are things we can do as families that will make a huge impact
throughout the year.
It starts with helping our
kids to celebrate the world in which we live, and it continues with
helping them to love it so much that they want to do everything they
can to help protect it. Here are six ideas to help your kids celebrate
and care for our earth:
1. Get out and enjoy it.
Researchers are now saying that simply getting kids outside in nature
may be the most effective way to raise their awareness of environmental
issues. Suddenly, these problems that they hear about on the news and
in the classroom have a real impact on their daily lives. They see
firsthand how a forest or a beach or a tidepool or a meadow is teeming
with life, with ecological relationships that are interdependent,
delicate and complex.
To encourage your kids to
get out there and enjoy the natural world, you may have to purposefully
inject some extra excitement in the idea, but just at first. Take your
dog (or a friend's dog) for a walk in the woods. A dog's love for
nature, and subsequent enjoyment of it, is infectious. Create a list of
things to find and make your adventure into the outdoors into a
scavenger hunt.
If possible, and if your kids
are old enough to be by themselves out there, find a safe place for
them to play in a natural environment. Allow them to go there to get
away, to sit and think or to talk with their friends. Make a point to
get the kids out in nature every day. Better yet, go with them.
2.
Watch "An Inconvenient Truth" as a family for inspiration. Invite some
of your children's friends over to watch it with their parents and talk
about some initiatives that you can each commit to or some larger
projects that you can work on as a neighborhood or community.
3.
Help your kids learn about endangered animals. Together, look into
organizations that help endangered animals and see how you can get
involved.
4. Reduce and re-use, then recycle.
Lots of kids get excited about recycling. Fewer are into reducing or
re-using. Model to your children a healthy pattern of consumption. Talk
frequently about the many benefits (which go way beyond environmental)
of living a simple life and of being wary of a lifestyle of mass
consumerism. As kids spend more time outside and less time at the mall
or watching television advertisements, this shift may feel increasingly
more natural to them.
5. Teach your kids about
potentially harmful chemicals and how they can be everywhere in our
world: in the foods we eat, in the supplies we use to clean the house,
in our paint, in our cosmetics, in our lawn care products. Turn the
search for these things into a game and allow your kids to be
detectives, learning about and seeking out these harmful chemicals and
then finding natural alternatives.
6. The next
time you take the kids to the grocery store, see how you can minimize
the amount of packaging that you purchase. We have been known to
purposefully not purchase an item because of the manufacturer's use of
wasteful packaging. It won't take long for the kids to realize that the
best item in the store for minimal packaging: raw fruits and vegetables.
In
our family, the more we can make these life changes into a game, the
more apt the kids are to follow suit. Help your kids to understand how
one person really can make a difference (especially when that person is
part of a committed family or group) and review often the personal
impact that you all have made.
About
The Author
Jamie Jefferson writes for Momscape.com and
Susies-Coupons.com, where you'll find discounts on ethically-made
natural beauty products: http://www.susies-coupons.com/body.htm as well
as coupons for green living and organic products:
http://www.momscape.com/coupon-codes/gaiam.htm