Your Children and the Earth: 5 Ways to Benefit Both
Want to teach you kids about going green? Here are 5 different ways in which you can leave a lasting impact in your children’s lives that will also give them the power to benefit the planet.
- Teach them how to cook! Children who learn how to prepare their own food are slimmer, healthier and more in tune with their bodies than their non-cooking peers. You’ll have fun cooking together and you’ll set them off on a road filled with real food and not micro-waved junk. Your children will reap the benefits of eating healthy everyday of their long lives. Green benefit: No energy intense manufacturing of franken-foods, less carbon print in shipping, less material wasted in packaging highly processed fare, and less water polluted by printing colorful packaging material. Think about it – TV dinners could be something the next generation only knows from seeing them at the Smithsonian!
- Teach them how to hold an intelligent conversation! Talk with them – nonstop. Teach them to listen, express their views, make their voices heard. We need more intelligent people speaking up for the environment. They will inherit this planet and they will have to convince the skeptics to turn this ship around. It will also benefit your children to be able to string a sentence together without using the word “like”. I would strongly suggest we don’t leave this job up to TV – after all they “like” made Paris Hilton into a star – enough said. Green benefit: An outspoken, articulate generation, that grew up green!
- Teach your children to embrace exercise. There have been so many studies that point to this simple lifestyle choice as being a huge factor in our quality of life. It seems to me the more outdoorsy a person is the more they care about the planet. Exercise does not have to be expensive – take a walk, a hike, a swim and have fun! Teach your children that the outdoors is their playground. Green benefit: With the pride of ownership, comes a strong urge to protect!
- Teach them to embrace other cultures. Children who have a chance to read multi-cultural stories, or have playtime with kids of different cultures, or travel, tend to have a more realistic view of the world. The more we can show them that there are many cultures, all with different views, traditions and problems, the more prepared they will be to embrace dialog when it is their turn to make decisions. Green benefit: If there ever was such a thing as a global concern, the protection of our planet has to be it!
- Teach them how to interpret the news. Show them how to critically examine news sources, how to read statistics and how to spot manipulated news. Introduce them to independent news sources and make sure they understand how money figures into the business of selling news. Make fact checking and research a daily routine in your house – usually if you don’t look something up right when a question arises you just blew a huge learning opportunity. Teach them to be informed consumers in general but especially in regards to the media. Green benefit: Hopefully a generation of well-informed consumers, viewers, and readers will know to treat the Earth with the respect it deserves.By Moni, Vegetarian on the Cheap
Amen. Teach them to look, teach them to see, teach them to think.
you hit the nail on the head! now if we could just get ALL parents to do these things… what a wonderful world we would live in!!!