Sustainable Green Living: Ten Things to Tell Your Kids about part 3
Aug
05
Counting the Cost of Car and Air Travel
If there’s no choice but to use your car for most journeys ask your children to think of ways to cut down using the car. If children get used to going to school by car and never walk or take the bus, it’s hard to break the habit. But they may have friends who also go to school by car and whose parents can share the journeys with you. If there are several families who can share the driving, ask the children to work out the rota once they’re old enough to remember what’s been arranged. Children can take pride of ownership in a plan they’ve come up with.
Often children actually prefer to walk or cycle but parents are reluctant to allow them out alone. Ask if there are friends who would like to walk or cycle together. Arrange for them to go on a cycling proficiency course and everyone will feel safer.
Cycling is good exercise, but if it isn’t fun, all the messages about reducing pollution and greenhouse gases, and using a cheap means of transport, fall on deaf ears. Your children will demand a car as soon as they’re old enough to drive. Be flexible about reverting to a lift in the car occasionally when the weather’s bad or cycling is just too much of a struggle.
Talk to your children about holidays they would like to have in the UK and explain why it’s good for the environment to cut down on the number of flights you make. Explain to them about offsetting the amount of carbon your travel produces and work out how much that costs for each journey. Ask your children to think about that cost and help you to decide as a family whether to pay the extra or to cut down on the travelling you do.
Reining in the Water Use
Most children love water as long as they don’t have to wash too often. Remember that when you’re nagging your children to have a shower and brush their teeth you’re asking them to use water. When you’re telling them to turn off the tap while brushing their teeth and have showers instead of baths to save water, you’re sending out a fairly mixed message. If possible go for reusing and recycling water. Collect rainwater in a butt in the garden and use that for flushing the toilet. Teach your children to flush the loo when there’s brown matter in it but leave it when there isn’t. If you can install a system to collect bath and shower water before it reaches the sewage system and reuse it, they’ll see that their used water can be used for washing the car and the windows, and watering the garden. Keep the messages simple.
Getting involved in Projects That Protect the Planet
Trips to any projects concerned with the planet and how it works will whet your children’s appetite to know more. Camping, and visits to farms, museums, landfill sites, and recycling plants are interactive demonstrations that get them interested.
If they do show an interest set them the task of checking in their local area and on the Internet for projects that they’d like to become involved in that give them practical experience.
Respecting Other Cultures
Appreciating how people in other cultures live and what problems they face can help children understand why adults are getting so worked up about the environment and leading a greener lifestyle. Explain the ideas behind fair trade, air miles, locally grown food, and saving local environments such as the rainforests. Discuss with them how demands for more and more oil and wood, for example, take valuable resources out of the earth that can’t be put back. Show them what our demands do to the areas these resources are taken from. Talk to them about the alternatives. Relating the need to use alternatives to the effects our lifestyles have on other people will give them a picture that’s easier to understand.
Making a Career Out of Green Living
Careers teachers in schools don’t always mention careers in conservation and environmental protection when giving children advice, even though this growing sector has a lot of job opportunities.
Natural Talentis a training programme of apprenticeships for the next generation of naturalists. It’s based in Scotland and Northern Ireland and gives young people with an interest in the natural world the opportunity to learn specialist conservation skills. There are apprenticeships in beetles, freshwater and grassland conservation, lichens, and more.
Apprentices get money from a bursary scheme and extra money for training and equipment. You don’t need any qualifications to apply, and the training lasts for 12 to 18 months depending on which apprenticeship you choose.
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