Your home is special to you. It’s where you learn and grow, and it’s where you teach your children the difference between right and wrong. What your kids see you doing is what they grow up to be. That’s why you need to more conscientious about what you’re doing around the home. If you want to teach your children to be clean, then you need to be clean. If you want your kids to be kind, then you should be kind. If you want your kids to pay attention to the environment, then you should make sure that your home is eco-friendly. Luckily, there are some easy and simple things that you can use to help your kids recognize the importance of being environmentally friendly.
1. Teach Your Children to Turn Off the Lights
Kids know how to turn on the lights pretty well. The problem is that they don’t always turn off the lights. Show your children the importance of turning off the lights when they’re not using a room. If you want, you can even make it into a game. Give them points every time they leave a room and turn off the light and make sure that they get rewarded for their efforts. You can also go around the house and show them the difference between an incandescent light and an LED light. If you haven’t changed your light bulbs to LED, then you can go around the house with the kids and change all the light bulbs over. To teach them more about conserving energy, you can show them the different types of solar panels and ways that you can conserve energy through renewable resources.
2. Take Shorter Showers
If you have young kids who you help in the shower and the bath, teach them the importance of conserving water. If possible, have them take showers instead of baths since it will help conserve water. For yourself, take shorter showers and use less hot water since hot water uses more gas than a cold shower does. Also, make sure that your kids know the importance of turning off the water while they are brushing their teeth or soaping their hands in the sink. If they can understand that water isn’t unlimited, they will start to understand other aspects of the environment.
3. Start a Garden
Starting a garden is a great way to teach children about the environment. Growing your own food is also environmentally friendly because you don’t have to spray pesticides on the fruits and vegetables and you don’t have to have the food transported over long distances to get to you. As you start your garden, also start a compost bin that you can put your kids in charge of. They will love the experiment of watching the food turn into rich dirt, and it will be fun for them to spread out the compost in the garden.
4. Reduce the Amount of Meat Your Family Eats
The meat industry contributes a ton to global warming. The animal farms have runoff that pollutes water sources, and the farms release a significant amount of CO2 and methane. And also the meat produced only contributes to 18% of the calories that are eaten, the animal agriculture uses up 87% of farmland worldwide. Teach your children the importance of eating meat irregularly. Have “meatless Mondays” or make a habit of eating meat only once or twice a week. There are so many ways that you can make sure that your kids are getting all the nutrients that they need without making them eat meat.
Having an environmentally friendly home is a great way to contribute back to the world. By doing it, you will be adding years onto the life of the world. By teaching your kids the importance of treating the environment with respect, you show them that it is important and they can grow up with those same ideas.
