Innocent Little Environmentalists: Hiding our Dirty Secrets from our Kids
The other day I sat down to read One Child by Christopher Cheng, one book of about a thousand that my girls had chosen from the library that morning. The cover is pure candy for kids, featuring a smiling girl’s face at the bottom looking up at at a giraffe, a toucan, and a chameleon–it had my girls at hello. So down we sit, I open the book up, take a deep breath, and –SCREEEEEECH! Yeah, the smiling little girl? She sits, traumatized, in front of a TV in which there’s pollution, deforestation, and animal exploitation, of all things, before she and her happy little friends get to start picking up trash and riding the bus and marching on Washington.
Sure, I want my kids to pick up trash and ride the bus and march on Washington, too, but is this picture book really appropriate reading material for a preschooler and a toddler?
- » See also: Grow Your Own Tree Hugger: 101 Activities to Teach Your Child How to Live Green
- » Get Eco Child’s Play by RSS or sign up by email.
That’s the question, isn’t it: Do we or don’t we tell our small kids about the bad stuff, the dangers to our environment? They love animals–do they need to know how they’re endangered? They love trees–do they need to know about deforestation? They love the snow–do they need to know about global warming?
Mind you, my kids are still very young, but I’m firmly in the “don’t we” camp until they’re much, much older–probably older than you’d think. And it’s not just the scare factor, although of course that’s important. Most important to me, however, is the truism evident in that old Baba Dioum adage: before my very young children have to think about saving the world, I want them to learn to love and respect it. I want my girls to be “forest citizens” long before they learn about carbon emissions; to garden long before they learn about world hunger; to reuse and recycle long before they learn about pollution.
But how can I ever tell them?
We don’t believe in Santa Clause at our house. Perhaps this, this belief that the world is a perfect and uniformly wondrously beautiful place full of happy animals and people, will instead be their time of childish innocence that is then sullied and betrayed in the path to adulthood.
What about you? What do you teach your children, and when?
I don’t think toddlers and preschoolers are too young to learn about the ramifications of their choices. That said, there is a point at which it’s a case of “too much information”–more data than their little brains can understand yet, more sadness than their little hearts can process.
My husband and I have explained the concept of recycling to our three-year-old. She delights in watching the recycling truck stop by our house weekly and reminds us that “that stuff is going to be made into other things.”
Now that she can reach many of the light switches and lamps in our house, we’ve also taught her about electricity conservation.
My husband and I have both been vegetarians for many, many years (long before we met) and our raising our daughter as one, too. We’ve discussed this with her, too. We haven’t told her about the socioeconomic and environmental ramifications of eating meat, just that eating meat hurts animals (which she loves). She also understands that many people do choose to eat meat, and we are careful not to vilify them in these conversations (since only a handful of our friends are vegetarians).
On these topics of global social and environmental significance, my husband and I are following the same plan we have for other “big” topics (e.g., death, sex): if she’s old enough to ask, she’s old enough to know. We won’t do an information dump–simply give her enough true answers until she’s satisfied.
I think that if kids are asking about hunger in the world and environmental problems, then their brains and hearts are ready for some answers. At this age, though, I wouldn’t go out of my way to put those issues right in front of them (via the book you mentioned).
I love that strategy, and my kids certainly don’t ask the questions, so frankly I’m relieved to have a reason not to talk about the “bad stuff”–funny, but I’ve been really comfortable talking to them about sex and death. Perhaps this issue is my sticking point?
Yes, one of my biggest pet peeves about raising my girls is finding scary environmental information hiding inside materials otherwise perfectly appropriate for their age group. We don’t do commercial media–TV, feature films, etc.–so I wonder if it’s a problem there, too?
Wow, interesting. My son is only 20 months old, but I think I’m going to go the same way you’ve chosen. There’s plenty of time for them to learn that we recycle, reuse, and care about the earth because it’s in such bad shape. For now I’ll just teach him the right habits to develop. Later we’ll discuss why.
Wow, yeah, I know what you mean. A friend of mine recently had to explain to her 5 year old what “abortion” was. Horrific. We want to teach our kids to respect all living things, great and small, but we want to walk the line between informing them and terrifying them to the horrors that really do occur in our world. I haven’t seen that book, but it sounds like it probably crosses the line.
This is very interesting. I have two children ages 6 and 4 and we talk about recycling a lot and read books about landfills but that is pretty much it. I have not figured out a way to explain things in a way that they will be able to digest. I would love to see some of your thoughts and tips on video. http://www.mindbites.com/content/the-baby-formula
Explaining to kids about recycling is one thing I find very easy to do. Both of my kids understood much of what went into the trash versus recycle bin by age 2. Not perfectly, but they got it right most times.
More serious issues we don’t cover so much. They sometimes pick up trash on the way home, and we talk a lot about not wasting or buying things we don’t need. That’s enough for a 6 and 3 year old for me.
[...] Read more of this story » [...]
[...] have two little girls, and I am NOT a fan of frightening picture books about environmentalism. At my girls’ young ages, their time is best spent learning to know and love nature, as well as [...]