Are you an eco-conscious parent wondering how you can live sustainably even with kids? Here are some simple ways to live sustainably with kids from eco-friendly food choices to sustainable home solutions to simply leading by example!
How To Live Sustainably with Kids
So from personal experience and talking with others, being an eco-conscious parent can create a ton of guilt and stress about their family’s lifestyle. We also tend to just stress about if it’s ever enough. Moreover, there’s so many sustainability tips out there and sometimes they just don’t work for families or even individuals.
Well, guess what?! If you’re making any effort, then it’s enough. You can do more, but it’s about sustaining what you are doing. A sustainable lifestyle should be achievable for everyone anywhere otherwise it’s not really sustainable or manageable in the long run and everyone loses. For us, it’s about progress and balance. You can have a radical impact on our environment without radical changes to your lifestyle or stressing over if you need to do more. Kids create enough stress as it is!
So here are a few of the ways we live sustainably with kids as examples. Pick one or a few or all of them to implement, but remember to find a balance that works for your family that you can sustain.
What Does It Mean To Live Sustainably?
So to be clear for everyone, I want to give a baseline on what sustainable living can mean. Sustainable living describes a lifestyle that attempts to reduce an individual’s or society’s use of the Earth’s natural resources and one’s personal resources.
For us, to live sustainably really just means we try to minimize our use of Earth’s resources and any damage created by human and environment interactions. We push towards minimizing our impacts on our environment.
Now here are some simple ways we live sustainably with kids.
Lead By Example and Action
This is the biggest thing any parent can do for a family to live more sustainably with kids. I’ve found that leading by example and taking actionable steps towards sustainability impacts my child the most.
For example, my toddler will finish eating and sometimes have food scraps left. We’ll ask him to compost the food scraps and he’ll take his plate over to the kitchen compost bin and put it in. He does this because he sees us do this as parents and we explain our actions on why composting is important. He’s a toddler so he may not understand it fully yet, but it’s building good eco-friendly behaviors and habits that I hope will stay with him.
Don’t Fear Talking About Sustainability with Kids
Provide Age-Appropriate Educational Material
Books about sustainability and climate change are great ways to talk about these topics with kids. The books keep the content age-appropriate so a kid can understand. The best part I’ve found about reading is it always opens up the door for the child to ask questions on their own terms or take time to think about it themselves.
For younger kids, I loved incorporating STEAM and nerdy books from the beginning. Baby Loves Green Energy and Climate Change for Babies are a couple of my favorite board books that discuss climate change and protecting the environment.
For older kids, I’ve discovered NASA’s Climate Kids website, which is a great resource for discussing different climate topics. It even has games and activities a family can use to educate, but have fun as well. The activities tab has some seriously great ideas for kid activities if you’re trying to come up with ones!
Focus on the Positive
Yes, climate anxiety is a thing and it’s really hard to not be overwhelmed by the scary and sad things, even as an adult. This can be reflected in our kids as well. Feelings are good though as they usually lead to action and can be turned into something positive.
I’ve found focusing on the positive truly has helped my individual sustainable living journey as well as my family’s. When you or your child is caught up with climate anxiety, try to flip it for something positive.
For example, the United Nations Environment Programme says globally “we p