My 6-year old son got eco-aversion. Sometimes it crossed my mind that this could happen, but I kind of dismissed it. I was thinking: “This could happen to others, but not to me or my family”. I was focused on not being pushy or controlling. I thought that I had smooth and gradual child-friendly approach to transitioning to greener living. Yet, I was wrong.
With hindsight and after some discussions with my son, I have been able to track down some green parenting mistakes that I made.
1) Not really following up on an expectation that I created
Do you remember my second going-green week post where I also mentioned that my children are looking forward to going to school by bike? For my oldest son, this was really something important, a facet of green living that made his eyes shine. I built on his enthusiasm and also bought me a bike. In the third week, we focused on greener commuting. However, biking to school and back did not really work out well, for many reasons.
I then kind of abandoned the idea and made more modest objectives for us. These, unfortunately, did not involve biking with my first-born. Yet my 6-year-old was more deeply disappointed than I realised. My first important green parenting mistake…
How to Fix?
Keeping promises to the children is important for many reasons, argues Dana Hall McCain. I have decided to bring his bike with me in the car once per week. Now, after school, he can bike in the nearby park with his friend while his siblings enjoy the playground. This experience was also a great lesson for me to be careful with my words and not to promise things too easily.
Another lesson I’ve learned related to avoiding green parenting mistakes is to build strongly on the kids’ desires. In the future, when I see an area that seems to make my kids passionate about the environment, I will follow it up more seriously.
2) Not explaining enough
“All this ecology, it does not really concern me,” said my son Lev at some point in our discussion.
Certainly, I did some explaining to my kids about the links between the changes that I introduced to our lives and the environment. I have mentioned a few times that plastic pollution harms fish and other animals. We’ve also talked about cars polluting the environment. However, these ideas remained too abstract and hard for children to grasp. And considering that I’ve now introduced quite few changes in our lives, these explanations may not have been nearly enough.
How to Fix?
To catch up, I looked online and found many short cartoons explaining environmental issues for children. Many of them explain the links between our habits and the environment in child-friendly ways.
I did not need to wait long to detect new passions in my kids. They recently played their first games online and loved it. This inspired me to look for video games that build environmental awareness. And I was right! Both my 6- and 4-year-olds played this little game from logiceleducatif.fr over and over:
For the new habits I will introduce, I aim to look for different child-friendly ways to explain to my kids how this certain activity could help the earth and also their lives. Hopefully this will help to keep them motivated and willing to change.
3) Not considering my children enough
Unfortunately, I did not take into consideration enough my kids’ age, their pace of change, and need for space to express their ideas and feelings about the transition to greener living.
I seem to have found (knock on wood) an age-appropriate way how to incorporate my 4-year-old son into the “going green” journey. He loved many activities we did, in particular those related to better recycling. Yet my oldest son Lev has not shared his enthusiasm.
Lev has also said several times that “Saving the planet is too hard.”
I found this cute, but I did not truly listen to what he said. His eco-aversion appeared in particular after we changed our food shopping habits. He kept telling me that he wanted his favourite cheese and yogurt. I planned to buy these for him from Migros, one of the supermarkets where we wanted to shop in the future, where these products are available. However, it emerged very clearly that Lev’s feelings weren’t really just about cheese and yogurt. My son was not ready to CHANGE from the old supermarket; there was too much change happening for him too quickly. He needed to slow down the pace and have a place to express his perspectives.
How to Fix?
Lev is currently learning to read and write and discovering the world of books. I thus bought him some secondhand books that explore environmental issues. Hopefully this helps a bit.
After 10 weeks of constant change I also decided to introduce “consolidation weeks” into our green journey. These are weeks when we do not introduce new habits. Instead, we consolidate what we have introduced and allow all family members to “catch up.” As our dog Fleur gets her food from an organic supermarket now, she also needs a bit of time to get used to the new eco-friendly diet:-)
I started my journey by exploring how eco-friendly we are. In my first blog post, I explained our tradition of regular family meetings. Recently, Lev asked me: “Can we have another family meeting soon? I want to discuss the ecological issues.” Then I realised that it had been several weeks we had not taken time for this cherished tradition. Despite that so much was going on. I quickly corrected the mistake, and we had a family meeting again!
4) Showing “eco-cartoons” on their regular “cartoon day”
We have a rule that the children are allowed to watch cartoons on some days of the week. When I started to realise that my son has an “eco-backlash,” I tried to fix my green parenting mistakes by showing him cartoons about environmental themes on one of his “cartoon days.” However, this made the whole situation even worse—his precious cartoon time, when he usually chooses any (age-appropriate) show he likes, was now threatened by ecological cartoons. This was the last straw for him.
How to fix?
Now, I let them watch eco-cartoons on one day in the week when they usually cannot watch cartoons. This right away made a huge difference. Cartoons on environmental issues are now special, like a treat one did not expect!
OTHER GREEN PARENTING ACTIVITIES
Week 11, focusing on green parenting also involved in addition to the “fixes” some other green parenting activities. For instance, we focused lately on:
- Making recycling bins from paper and cartoon that we found in our paper recycling bin
- Purchasing wood toys while travelling
- Going to the movies to see Frozen 2
I took my two older sons to see Frozen 2, movie from where the photo above (credit to Disney) also comes from. The feminist inside me felt proud to expose my sons to a movie that seems to be a bigger hit with girls. It was only during the movie that I realised that this was also an incredible green parenting activity! For those of you who have yet not seen the movie, I do not want to spoil the experience by saying too much. The review of Frozen 2 by Anita Singh in in the Telegraph states that:
“The film’s heroines, Elsa and Anna, discover that earlier generations put urban planning before nature, disregarding the beliefs of a native tribe and bringing a curse down on the kingdom of Arendelle. They set out to right the adults’ wrongs.”
Like Greta Thunberg’s generation.
HIGHLIGHTS
Another day, I was watching a video on Greta Thunberg. He came to watch with me, and soon I lost the phone to him. Lev loved listening to Greta and could not get enough. Some weeks ago, when I had explained him about climate strikes happening on Fridays and asked if he would be interested to go, he said, “No, I prefer to go to school and learn things.”
When I mentioned to him few days ago that there is another climate-related event in Geneva, he said he would like to go, even if it happens during school time! My heart was filled with joy when I saw my son Lev starting to be again more interested in environmental issues. At least some eco-parenting mistakes seem to be repairable!
How is your green parenting going? Which aspects have been challenging? What works well?
I thought I had nothing to say, since my girls are grown up (20 and 22 soon) and have left our home already to study elsewhere. But maybe my short comment can be useful to somebody. I had always tried to get my daughters to be aware of their doings when it came to where to buy food and what kind of food. I took them every Wednesday afternoon to a farmhouse, where they helped me to pick our vegetables. We went to local markets by bike or on foot. At the house we separated waste and I asked them to be careful with water and electricity. There were many times, when they felt annoyed by my concerns and repeating the same things again and again. When we only had “healthy food” at home, they went to play at their friends houses where they found all the junk food they wanted. They still talk about it and we laugh today. I guess, I should have been more moderate when they were little. Today, the have awareness but only go to any length in some areas like separating waste. However, I must say, that it was my older daughter who introduced me to become “almost” vegan. Globally, I think its important to do what we think is important to us. It is by living the example and having fun doing it, that one gets inspired.
It is great to hear about your experience, thanks so much for sharing! It is reassuring to know that today they laugh about these revolting moments and the great values and ways that you taught them constitute the foundation that guides them! I also believe that at the end of the day, we teach most by modelling and they learn more from our actions than from what we say. And it is sometimes challenging as a parent to know where exactly to put limits – that they have enough space of expressing who they are and what they think, yet that they also receive the structure that protects them when they are little and guides them when they are adults.