Keeping environmentally friendly habits not only benefits the current generation, but future ones as well. By passing these on to your children, you can further reduce the environmental footprint left by your family as whole. Read on for five ways you can educate your children on the importance and benefits of keeping their environment clean!

Encourage Them to Recycle

Recycling is a vital part of conserving our natural resources. By reusing materials, not only are materials like wood and water preserved, but less waste is sent to landfills. You can include your children in the family recycling plan. Teach them the differences between recyclable materials, such as paper, plastic, and metals. If your community recycling plan requires different bins for different items, make sure your children learn which materials go in which bin.

Use Recycled Paper for School Supplies

Any parent with school-age children knows how much paper is involved when purchasing school supplies. 180-page notebooks, folders, pencils; all of these and more require natural resources to manufacture. Fortunately, all the above have environmentally friendly alternatives that you can purchase for your children, even eco-friendly crayons!

Start a Garden

A family garden can instill children with an appreciation and responsibility for the environment early on as they care for their plants. The garden is filled with opportunities to teach children about different parts of the environment, like why bees are important to the development of many flowers and food products, or how plants use their environmental resources, such as sunlight, water, and air to grow.

Ride Their Bike or Walk to Get Around

While using the family car to get around is convenient, educating your children on alternative means of transportation is important in developing their planet-friendly habits. Many kid-friendly ways of getting somewhere are available, such as bikes, skateboards, scooters, and the like. By encouraging your children to use these, they’ll get more outdoor activity, and experience more of the environment so that they understand why conserving it is so important.

Learn to Respect the Outdoors

With so many forms of media that tend to keep children indoors, it can be difficult to get them out the door in the first place. In additional to having a family garden, you can put bird feeders and other items that briefly attract other animals around your home so that your children can see nature in action. Family vacations can also be used as an opportunity to educate your kids about our planet. A beach trip can be used to learn about the oceans, while a trip to a zoo or botanical garden can introduce kids to exotic plants and animals in a more hands-on setting.

By instilling green values in your children at an early age, they’ll be more likely to practice them in the future, as well as pass them on. Spreading the word of conversation to their friends or other family members will increase environmental awareness as a whole, and keeping our environment clean is everyone's responsibility.