World Wisdom: Teaching Your Kids To Save Energy

As a parent, one of your many responsibilities is to teach your children how to conserve energy. Your motivation for educating your children on how to conserve energy could be to reduce your carbon footprint, to keep your energy bill low, or a little bit of both. The energy habits you teach your children in their early years will likely be the habits they take into adulthood. While you may understand the importance of energy conservation, and the ramifications of paying expensive energy bills, both are concepts that can be difficult for your kids to comprehend. To teach your kids to save energy while retaining their interest, consider the tips below.

Don't Nag—Explain

As easy as it may be to do, avoid the temptation to nag at your kids when it comes to conserving energy. For example, if they keep forgetting to turn off the lights when they leave a room, find an analogy that they can relate to. You could compare unused lights in a room to one of their favorite electronic toys that accidentally gets left on. You might have to get creative, so find ways to compare energy savings to some of their favorite activities and interests.

Make It Fun

Any time learning is made fun, people retain information better—and this is no different when it comes to energy conservation. Look for ways that you can turn energy conservation in to a game. For example, if you have three children, you could create a points system that monitors who saves the most energy during a one-week period. You could give points for things like turning off the lights when they leave the room, remembering to unplug their chargers when not in use, and remembering to close windows and shut doors when the heat is on. You could also take away points when they forget to do these things. Also, look for energy conservation tools that your kids will enjoy, such as flower shaped solar chargers for their electronic devices.

Seek Out Child-Friendly Resources

Seek out kid-friendly resources and events in your local area that focus on energy conservation and green living. This could be anything from a wilderness summer camp, a day class at the community center, or citywide green events that provide activities for children. The more you expose them to environments and activities that celebrate energy conservation and green living, the more their green habits will become second nature. Also visit websites and online resources that have been designed with children in mind.

Practice What You Preach

One of the most important things to remember whenever you try to teach something to your child is that it is important to practice what you preach. Many of the habits your children develop are behaviors that they learn by following what you do as their parent. If you want them to commit to energy conservation, they need to see you doing all that you ask of them.

Energy conservation habits can be taught to children as young as toddlers. As your children get older, you can continue to increase the detail in which you explain why you want to conserve energy.

This article was written by mother and blogger, Ashlyn Cooper.  By teaching her kids about how to use less energy, she as saved a fortune on her electrical services in Houston, Texas.