How to Entertain Your Kids Without Electronics

Most kids these days love their electronic toys. It starts with the toys they get as babies and keeps going on. It’s a tough habit to break, as many of their friends will be enjoying electronic toys too.

It’s good to teach your kids that they don’t need electronic gadgets and toys to have fun. There’s a lot more out there for them to do.

Why Bother?

As this can be a frustrating thing to do, a big question may be why you should bother limiting your children’s use of electronics. Why not let them just go at it?

Much has to do with how children can become inactive due to their use of electronics, television, computers and video games in particular. Many kids spend several hours a day in front of one or another screen, rather than getting outside, playing and getting exercise and fresh air. It’s not healthy.

Board Games

While getting your kids to play outside is a good goal, there’s nothing wrong with playing a board game as a family, or even a more physically active classic game such as Twister.

Playing a game together as a family is a great way to spend time together. You can talk about whatever comes to mind, or just banter about the game. You can learn a lot about each other.

Send the Kids Outside

It’s best if you can get your kids to play outside every day. There’s a saying about how there’s no such thing as inappropriate weather, just inappropriate clothes. In other words, don’t worry about rain or snow. Dress the kids appropriately and let them have fun.

Do be careful about particularly hot days, of course, and use a safe sunscreen on your kids. Encourage them to wear hats outside as well to protect their skin. Have cold water ready for them to drink when they get thirsty.

You’ll have to be ready to deal with the mess of kids playing outside. Hot weather encourages the use of sprinklers and water toys, which can mean mud tracked in and water on the floor. So can rain and snow. Have towels ready to deal with the mess, and set limits about how much mess you can stand.

You can play games outside too. Teach your kids the classics, such as hide and go seek, Simon Says, Red Rover, tag and whatever else comes to mind. It’s good for you to get outside too.

How Do You Talk to Your Kids About Climate Change Without Scaring Them?

Climate change is one of those topics your kids are going to hear about eventually. If you think about it from a child’s perspective, it’s a kind of scary thing to think about. They take things such as the possibility that polar bears will go extinct due to melting ice in the Arctic very seriously and even personally.

It’s hard to balance protecting your kids with growing informed citizens who will care about the environment. Kids care almost too much for their own good.

Keep It Age Appropriate

It’s not always easy keeping talks about the environment and climate change age appropriate. Kids just have to catch a news story or educational program to start asking questions you aren’t sure how to answer.

My #1 rule has always been to keep it honest but age appropriate.

Try to focus on the things you can do as a family to help the environment. Discuss using less, recycling, driving less and so forth. Talk about why you make the choices you do.

As kids get old enough, start looking for appropriate volunteer opportunities. If your child has a particular interest, try to have the opportunity match it.

You can also help kids to learn the difference between climate and weather. This is one of those things it seems many adults have trouble with, but it could be an advantage in discussions if your kids do understand that weather is short term and climate is long term.

Get Into Nature

Kids will appreciate nature more if they see it in person. Not just the backyard or the local playground, go hiking and camping. If there are campgrounds in your area, you shouldn’t need to go far.

Try making hiking and camping a part of family vacations, especially if you travel to an unfamiliar place. Talk about how things change from place to place.

If you happen to know how climate change is impacting an area you’re in, you can talk about the evidence for it. It’s not always definite enough to blame changes on climate change, but other times you can see that the climate of an area is not what it used to be.

Talk About Local Issues

Climate change is not all about polar bears dying and glaciers melting. It’s also about what’s happening in your own area.

Is water becoming an issue? How has climate change effected winters in your area?

Find out together what’s going on with your local climate. If you don’t know much about the local situation already, you may learn some really interesting things yourself.

Read a Book Together

There are a range of books available that can help you to discuss climate change basics with your kids, all the way up to more advanced discussions. A good book can explain climate change in ways you probably won’t think of on your own. Here are some titles to consider buying or looking for at your local library:

The Magic School Bus And The Climate Challenge
A Kids’ Guide to Climate Change & Global Warming: How to Take Action!
How We Know What We Know About Our Changing Climate: Scientists and Kids Explore Global Warming
Mission: Planet Earth: Our World and Its Climate–and How Humans Are Changing Them
Climate: Causes and Effects of Climate Change (Our Fragile Planet)

How to Make School Lunches Your Child Will Eat

Many parents these days are concerned with the quality of lunches provided by public schools. To put it mildly, many schools offer extremely unhealthy foods for lunch. As parents who want their kids to eat better, how can you help them?

Packing a healthy lunch for your child is one of the simplest things you can do to help them eat better. The challenge is making a lunch they’re more likely to eat than to trade away to friends.

Pay Attention to Their Likes

The first thing to do is know what your child likes to eat. This may change from year to year and even in the middle of the school year. Keep talking to your kids about what they like to eat for lunch and find healthy ways to provide that.

School lunch packing is not the best time to experiment or challenge your child’s food preferences. It’s easy for them to trade away unliked foods, or even to just throw it away uneaten. Push their interests at home where you can see the results.

Leftovers

Sometimes leftovers are great for lunches. You may need to provide a thermos to keep the food warm, but other leftovers taste great cold.

If there’s a meal your kids really love, make extras that you can separate into easy lunches and freeze. You can save excess for dinners for the whole family as well, of course. Providing them with favorite home cooked meals to eat at school may increase the chances that your child will eat what you’ve given them.

Wraps

Don’t stick to the traditional sandwiches for every meal. Wraps are a great alternative, so long as you pick healthy whole grain tortillas, not just white flour tortillas.

Wraps are easy to make. You want to cover most of the tortilla, but leave a little distance from the edges to keep things neat. Lunch meats, vegetables and spreads work well. Mix them up and find out which your kids love the most. Do let your kids try hummus sometime, first at home, but if they like it, hummus is a great wrap ingredient.

Healthy Sides

Know what your kids love in terms of fruits and vegetables. Most will have a few favorites. Try to provide these in their school lunches.

My kids love bell peppers and cucumbers, for example. Put these in their lunch and they’ll usually be eaten.

Keep it Simple

Kids don’t need a feast at lunchtime. They need simple, filling foods and not a big selection. They’re usually as interested in chatting with their friends as they are in eating their food. Sometimes more interested in chatting with their friends. Give them too many choices and a lot of it will end up in the trash.

Dessert Doesn’t Have to Mean Sugar

Kids love getting a dessert item in their lunches. An occasional cookie or other treat isn’t going to ruin them either. But the dessert doesn’t have to be cookies or candy.

Berries work great. Granola bars usually have a lot of sugar, but have other healthy ingredients. Try to balance sweetness with good for your kids.

Variety May Not Be the Spice of Life

Don’t feel bad if you’re packing the same lunch over and over. Most kids like consistency. If they complain, that’s the time to mix things up.

Why Don’t People Buy Environmentally Friendly Products?

Lots of people want to be more environmentally friendly. Not everyone; in fact, some are downright opposed to the idea, and strongly. But even those who want to be more eco friendly in their homes won’t buy the products. Why is that?

Confusion

Confusion may be a large part of the problem. The various claims are confusing and often misleading. People don’t always know which products are really eco friendly versus merely being greenwashed.

Uncertainty About Quality

Many people aren’t at all certain that eco friendly products are going to be as good as conventional products. Conventional products are comfortable to use, and people know what they do. They’ve been using them after all.

Eco friendly products, on the other hand, are less well known. Many people don’t have a friend familiar enough with the products to share success stories or to say to avoid particular products that don’t work so well.

Many eco friendly products are not advertised in the same way conventional products are. You don’t see them on television so much unless they’re made by one of the big brands. While some don’t like to admit it, such advertising has a big effect on how products are viewed.

Hard to See Personal Benefit

Telling someone that a product benefits the environment is great. Lots of people like to hear that. But it’s hard to get people to take action without a quickly obvious personal benefit.

That’s much harder to demonstrate, as the basic benefit of using an environmentally friendly product is about the same as using a conventional product. The potential long term personal health benefits and benefits to the environment are much harder to see.

Cost

Eco friendly products are perceived as more expensive. That’s because many of the most visible products do cost more. Organic cotton products cost more. Hybrid cars cost more. Solar panels are expensive.

Yet many eco friendly products are easily affordable. Vinegar and baking soda work very well as cleaning products, but many people aren’t aware that they can be used in this way or that they do such a good job. Other eco friendly products can also be affordable.

“One Person Can’t Make a Difference”

Many people feel that what they do personally doesn’t make a significant difference. They’re both right and wrong about that.

Choosing eco friendly products can be better for your health, and while you can’t define that difference much of the time, it can be a difference.

But even more important is that as each individual makes the choice of buying eco friendly products shows businesses that it’s worth their time and money to provide eco friendly products. Choosing to do business with companies with eco friendly practices makes it worth their while to continue to improve those practices. It takes more than one to make that difference, but if individuals don’t make those choices, the pressure never builds up on the businesses to make the change.

Can Disposable Diapers Ever Be the Green Choice?

Not every family wants to use cloth diapers. I strongly prefer them to disposables, having used both types, but washing cloth diapers isn’t something that all families are up for.

What are the chances for a disposable diaper to be a green choice? Does that ever happen?

Green and eco friendly are hard words to define. In general, something that creates waste and cannot be reused is not going to be as eco friendly as something that can be used over and over, and even handed down when you’re done with it.

There are times, however, that a disposable diaper makes sense.

That would be when water usage matters. If you’re living in an area with a severe drought, having water available for drinking is far more important than using water for washing diapers. That’s a place you can cut back on your water use.

When that kind of situation happens, the important thing is to pick the most environmentally friendly disposable diaper you can buy. Don’t be fooled by the eco claims of major brands – they’re usually too vague and use words that don’t have any legal meaning to make themselves sound good.

The trouble is that even the more environmentally friendly disposables aren’t that much better than the traditional disposables. They don’t use bleach, they use renewable resources for parts of the diaper, they don’t use latex or fragrances. But they cost more than traditional diapers as a rule, making this as much a budgetary decision as a green one for most families. There’s usually a limit for how far we can vote with our wallets while raising a family.

Biodegradable diapers are another option. You can throw these into your compost pile, although due to the human waste involved the compost should then not be used on food plats. Safe enough for anything you aren’t going to eat, however.

Some come as covers with biodegradable liners that you dispose of in your compost. Biodegradable doesn’t work so well in a landfill, as they get covered too quickly to properly biodegrade. If you just throw them in the trash, you aren’t taking advantage of their biodegradability.

When it comes right down to it, I still have to recommend cloth diapers over other diapering options. Preferably organic cloth diapers.

But if it happens that you must use some sort of disposable, don’t reach for the easiest solution or the greenest looking package. Take a better look and find the balance between caring for the environment and being kind to your wallet. Sometimes the answer you want isn’t the one you can afford.