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?

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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?

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