Sparking Love for Planet Earth
It’s that time of year again - spring has sprung, the trees and flowers are blooming, and it is EARTH DAY! While it’s important to celebrate and care for our planet every day of the year, Earth Day provides a wonderful opportunity for us to remember how important protecting our environment is, to recommit to sustainable, climate-friendly practices, and to teach our children about the impact we have on our ecosystems. To celebrate Earth Day, let’s talk about ways to address conversations about the environment and climate change with children. Bonus - I’ll give you some fun suggestions for ways to celebrate the environment and create eco-conscious traditions as a family.
For younger children, it’s important to begin to instill a sense of wonder and appreciation for the environment. This could include planting seeds together, noticing nature, and helping to care for animals. Young children don’t yet have the cognitive development to process the complexity of things like climate change, ozone depletion, and deforestation without it becoming a source of anxiety, so it’s okay to avoid this subject until they are a bit older. For older children, you can start to have the climate change conversation, emphasizing and reassuring them that there are lots of adults researching and working to help repair the environment. There is some really helpful verbiage for this conversation that you can find on the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) website here.
Here are some ideas for celebrating Earth Day (or for incorporating into your everyday eco-friendly practices):
Volunteer to pick up litter together at a local park or trail
Teach your child how to sort recycling from trash
Create a compost pile together
Start a Meatless Monday tradition
Have a scavenger hunt in your home for single-use plastic, and shop together for reusable alternatives
Read books together about the environment (Some suggestions are The Lorax, The Tragic Tale of the Great Auk, The Problem of the Hot World, The Brilliant Deep, and The Tantrum That Saved The World)
Make a bird feeder together (tutorial here)
Make paper and create pictures together (tutorial here)
Have a rainbow scavenger hunt outside, where you race to find natural things in each color of the rainbow
Make seed bombs (tutorial here)
Make birdseed ornaments and find a special spot to hang them (tutorial here)
Build a bug hotel (tutorial here)
Do an oil spill experiment together (tutorial here)
Take a virtual tour of a national park (here)
Check out the Smithsonian Learning Lab and learn about environmental history and activism together (here)
You can find more tutorials and craft ideas here, here, and here. Like so many other aspects of parenting, teaching children about the environment is most effective if they see you modeling the appropriate behavior. If you show them your love of nature and a care for your ecosystem, your child will emulate this way of thinking. It’s not about big projects and grand gestures (though those are great when you have time and bandwidth), but rather, the small scale actions that you can take each day as a family to decrease your individual carbon footprint. As Fred Rogers said:
“When we turn off lights and when we turn paper over to use the back of it, when we gather newspapers for recycling, and even when we marvel at a sunset, we send loud and clear messages to our children that caring for our planet is important to us…Attitudes are ‘caught,’ not taught!”
Happy Earth Day!
