A Look at Parenting and the Environment for Blog Action Day

It’s Blog Action Day today, when bloggers around the world are encouraged to write about a single issue. This year, it’s the environment. Given that this is a parenting blog, however, I want to tackle this from a parent’s perspective.

When I think about parenting and the environment, two things spring to mind. One is the often-vociferous debate about cloth versus disposable diapers. My opinion is that there is not one universal answer to this question, but depends on a number of variables, including the efficiency of one’s washer, the type of detergent used, whether you use a diaper service, whether you live in a drought-afflicted area, which type of diaper better holds your particular child’s output, and whether you use major-brand disposables or ones that are bleach free and biodegradable. A good article to get you thinking about these issues is Elisa Batista’s The Poop on Eco-Friendly Diapers. Of note is also a more recent four-year study by the British Environment Agency, which found that “the electricity used and greenhouses gases generated washing and drying cloth diapers was equally damaging to the environment as burying disposable diapers in landfills.”

Perhaps the only environmentally friendly solution is a diaper-free baby, a method author Christine Gross-Loh is promoting via her Web site and in her book The Diaper-Free Baby. At first glance, though, it seems like this method would only work for a stay-at-home parent who has the time to keep tabs on a child’s elimination needs. Not sure it’s practical for everyone. I don’t have any personal experience with it, however, or know anyone who does. Readers?

The second big issue that I think about when it comes to parenting and the environment is how to teach our children to protect it. We can buy middle-schoolers the children’s version of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, or download coloring sheets and stories from the U.N. or the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (though depending on what you feel about the last two organizations, this may have a certain ironic flavor). More useful, I think, is to get our kids involved as soon as possible with actions that impact the environment, especially their local ones. Children can help bring plastic bottles to the recycling bin as soon as they can walk. They can join you for a clean-up day at a local park. You can talk about why not to leave the water running and the fridge open.

What do you do in your daily lives to teach your kids about responsible stewardship of our world?