The Story of Broke is the new, short film from Annie Leonard’s The Story of Stuff Project. The Story of Stuff looked at the production and disposal of the stuff in our lives and the happiness it doesn’t bring us. The new movie is meant to stimulate thinking about how to pay for economic changes that support greater happiness through education, healthcare, and renewable energy and less propping up of the stuff economy.

Critiques of the movie are saying that it is simplistic, but I think it is just simple. It is meant to be an introduction that stimulates a new way of thinking. It isn’t a new way of thinking to everyone, but it is not the mainstream way of thinking, and her films are all meant just to start the broader thinking about possibilities. A lot of the stuff of our lives is so familiar that we don’t think about why we use it, how it got here, and where it goes when we are done. A 20-minute cartoon about trash might just give us a little ah-ha moment that encourages us to dig deeper. This new 8-minute movie is just an eco baby step on our way to thinking differently.

One of my favorite things about the movies from The Story of Stuff Project are the resources behind each film. Not only do they provide an annotated script for each film, they have curriculum resources for every age. If you have very young children, you might enjoy watching Loop Scoops videos with them. These are very short videos made in conjunction with PBS Kids to explore simple, age-appropriate aspects of stuff like juice boxes, Velcro, magazines, and happiness.

Annie Leonard and her project are U.S.-based, but the general pattern of how to shift to renewable energy and economies that prioritize—or even just recognize—happiness as a desired goal apply to every one of us.

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Last week I wrote about teaching children about eco-friendly living and about how to share your life changes with those around you. I want to share with you one of the people who has been trying to help those concerned with sustainability to inspire change: John Marshall Roberts, a behavioral psychologist who applies science to communications that create change.

For the most part, he’s talking to the nonprofit leaders and marketers, but I think his ideas will help you see how to inspire people around you to make their own changes. In the video above, he explains a very basic distinction that will help you to be a persuasive communicator.

If you find this idea helpful, check out some of his more polished videos on inspiring sustainability in skeptics (6:18) and the history of human thinking (6:04, a beautiful video). Both videos practice the kind of communications that inspire change.

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If you are excited about the changes you are making in your life, you probably want to share. If you have shared your experience, you may have found that sometimes people really just don’t want to hear it. What is the best approach to sharing as you make big life changes?

Just like sharing your eco-friendly lifestyle choices with your children, we need to recognize that the choices and decisions all belong with the other person. Make sure you are sharing without judging. Don’t let your sharing become bullying.

My Lessons Learned from Birth Stories

I have become especially aware of the perils of sharing when it comes to birth choices. I love to share my experience of birth. I realized over time that just talking about my birth choices and experiences was seen by some as a judgment. I didn’t intend it that way, and I didn’t say my way is the right way, but people are especially sensitive about their choices. The result can be tense. So I am less likely, maybe even unlikely, to share unless asked, and I make an extra effort to keep myself more aware of how to share without triggering a negative response.

Also, when a woman is pregnant, she’s in the middle of her journey and doesn’t need my baggage on her trip.

Now, I’m always careful in how I ask about birth plans and expectations. I end a conversation with a pregnant woman about birth by saying, “I hope the birth goes exactly as you want it to.” My wish is sincere, and it doesn’t add my own expectations where they don’t belong.

My experience with birth stories helped me to share with greater compassion and understanding for the perspectives of others. My experience is just mine. I do want to connect with others, but I don’t want to impose my truths on them.

Your Baby Steps Aren’t My Baby Steps

Your eco baby steps aren’t necessarily my eco baby steps. I try to share my steps, and I want to hear what steps you are taking or aspiring to take. You’re out there taking steps that haven’t even occurred to me yet, and I want to know all about those as well!

Don’t let worry keep you from talking. The conversations are inspiring. We all want to take steps to improve home and world for our families. Sharing how we do that is a catalyst to new ideas and an inspiration to action. Making these connections is such a pleasure, and we develop new relationships around these conversations. So, talk!

Where to Start?

When you want to share your new choices, start by listening. Ask questions. Establish an understanding of what you share in common with others. Then share your experience where it differs after you have established a level of trust.

Sharing gently and genuinely is an art. I’m sure I fail every day, but I try again to improve.

I know from our recent customer survey that many of you want to find ways to educate family and friends without offending them. Next week, I will try to help you find those ways to share.

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If you are thinking about how to teach your children about eco-friendly living, you may be wondering how to make those choices stick.

First of all, let go! Their choices will be their choices. Once you let go, you can be more easy going about the process of teaching your children.

Creating sustainable habits is an important start. By modeling eco-friendly choices and behaviors, your children will see WHAT to do.

To give your children tools they can use into the future, though, you need to help them understand HOW and WHY your family does what you do. Share with them your underlying reasons for your actions.

Start the conversation
Talk with your children. Share the decision making. Make sure they have power to make choices that will have real impact, so they feel responsibility for what they choose. They will remember the choices as well as the decision making process better if they are genuinely involved.

Encourage questions and curiosity
If you children ask questions, answer them with only as much information as they can take on using vocabulary they understand. Teach them how you get your information. Especially if they are older, invite them to do their own research and be part of the effort to reduce your household impact. They can deal with more information as they get older and have more points of reference.

Create points of reference
Read stories about sustainability, and bring those stories back to a family reference. For a place to start, check out 30 great books that teach children to be green. Your local library may even have a lot of these books grouped together on the shelf. When your child knows a lot of stories about efforts to lower environmental impact, it gets easier to see the relationship of those choices to self.

Hold family meetings on green topics
Family meetings give an opportunity for short, focused discussion on a topic. At one family meeting, my family gathered around our utility bills and asked how we could use less energy and water. Once we shifted from talking about it to giving the children a puzzle to solve, they were more curious and more engaged. They took ownership of their suggestions, and they remember better what commitments they made to meet our targets. Because they suggested not turning on the lights during the day, they are now more likely to sit by the window or go outside to read instead of turning on the light.

Don’t scare them
Children are sensitive. I made the mistake of giving too much information too early. Saying, “If the sea rises another meter, the lane in front of Granny’s house will be covered in water,” was a frightening concept to an 8-year old. Oops. What is just an interesting fact to you might be more than your child can comfortably process. Watch carefully as your child is talking and listening, and adjust as your discussion progresses to keep from making the conversation too scary. Sure, it’s important to be realistic, but you want your children to be motivated to take action.

The key is engagement. Give your children a little information at a time, and let them arrive on their own at the place where it clicks.

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I want my children to act in eco-friendly ways because they care about sustainability. Caring isn’t inherited, though, and, if I teach them well, they will think for themselves, so they won’t necessarily come to the same conclusions I have about appropriate responses to the state of the world.

Even if we were all to arrive at the same conclusions, we wouldn’t necessarily get there at the same pace.

And, you know we won’t all arrive at the same conclusions.

The only hope if you want your kids to be eco friendly is to teach them the underlying principles and set them free to come to their own conclusions. When they are very young, they will probably lift their opinions from yours, but that will end soon enough. While they still think you have the answers, make sure you help them understand why you care about your environmental footprint and how that influences the choices your family makes.

Sustainability Curriculum

I found that it wasn’t enough to just tell my children what we are doing as a family. I have years of influence that brought me to any given moment’s decisions. I wanted teaching tools to help me integrate environmental education into our homeschooling.

After looking at a variety of resources, we chose Facing the Future as our environmental education curriculum. I like that they don’t take environmental issues out of context. Connections are complex, but they provide curriculum from elementary to post-secondary levels.

The global issues addressed through Facing the Future are:

• Nature and Natural Resources
• Human Health and Wellbeing
• Impacts on the Planet
• Government and Economy

The subject areas addressed through Facing the Future are:

• Literacy
• Language Arts
• Math
• Science
• Social Studies

Their approach to global sustainability is multi-diciplinary, and their lessons always encourage students to take action. They emphasize service learning, media literacy, and understanding how worldview and culture shape our perceptions of the world.

Sometimes I look at curriculum and think, “I could have done a better job with this.” That’s inevitable for a PhD who has spent a lot of years teaching. I don’t say that with this curriculum. Not even close. This curriculum is far beyond the level that any individual could put together alone. Facing the Future is a team—a BIG team—and I am constantly grateful for their work in developing this valuable tool.

We have used Global Issues and Sustainable Solutions (grades 6-8). We’ve also downloaded some of their free environmental education lessons. I’m looking forward to Buy, Use, Toss? A Closer Look at the Things We Buy (grades 9-12), but I’m trying not to get ahead of myself. We have more middle school resources to get through before we need to face high school

How have you taught your children about sustainability and green living? What tools and resources have you found helpful?

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Educational
We offer a quality selection of educational toys to capture your child’s imagination and enhance intellectual growth. Our learning toys, puzzles or books encourage your child’s curiosity, discovery, and creativity. Equally important, our toy selection must also be non-toxic and safe for our children.

Every time we answer a child’s questions or feed her curiosity, we are taking an educational opportunity. Any time we encourage a child to be passive or follow a rigid path through a game, we are discouraging that curiosity that leads to discovery and real learning and development.

Children would probably tell you that they play for fun. Whether they realize it or not, they also play to learn. A toy doesn’t need to force a child into learning A Lesson. When we nurture curiosity, education comes naturally and without the explicit statement of what the lesson might be.

We like to leave open spaces for children’s own discovery and encourage children to make a toy of anything that strikes them as fun, even common household objects.

Educational Products at bynature.ca

Among our educational products for children are a variety of art supplies, building blocks, or—one of our favorites—kits that encourage children to make their own.

Farmer’s Market Cooperative Game

In the Farmer’s Market, vendors and customers are looking, buying and returning products. If some vendors don’t sell enough, they will leave. The players’ shared goal is to look out for everyone’s well being. This requires discussion, planning and decision making. There is both a basic game for younger children and an advanced game for older players.

Handmade in Canada for 2-6 players ages 6 to 12.

A review of Farmer’s Market from Arlene:

I wanted to take this time to tell you how much we have enjoyed your games! I love the fact that my kids can play (without me) and I know that they will have fun and enjoy each other. The best part is that they don’t get frustrated with each other!

This month, we are telling you more about our Safe Family Promise at bynature.ca. To make it easy for you to identify products by their key attributes, look for our standards labels.

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The decision to send your child to school or to homeschool should be made based on your child’s need and your willingness. You may also find that it helps you to make a decision if you visit schools and visit with homeschooling families. Try several, since both educational situations come in many varieties.

Visit Schools and Homeschools

Many schools hold open house events for parents of pre-school age children. Ask other parents about their children’s schools to learn what options you have locally, and visit every school you can. Start without your child then take him if you find yourself interested in the school.

Visiting several local child-centered schools and a few charter school meetings was a factor in my decision to homeschool my children—not the only factor but an important way to let me visualize my first child in each setting and ask whether this is where she belonged.

Look up local homeschooling support groups as well. Visit the group meetings. If they sponsor activities, they may invite you along. Once you know homeschooling families well enough, ask if you can spend a day with them just to see how their approach to education works.

I started attending a homeschool support group when my children were very small. We all went on fieldtrips and sports days together. I also visited homeschooling families and found it very helpful to see not only how they structured (or unstructured) learning but how they set up their space.

I am very visual, and I needed the variety of views to give me a rich picture of the potential learning environments available to my children.

Read, A Lot

Start at the library and don’t get too attached to reading whole books about education. Pile the books high. Skim each one. If it doesn’t grab you, shut it! Open the next. Only read what interests you because there are plenty more books and strong opinions about education.

Do the same with schooling information websites and personal blogs. Don’t read so much that you are overwhelmed, but follow the threads that intrigue you.

Then stop. Give yourself time just to talk and think so you don’t submerge your own genuine responses in the passions of others. Make sure that one of the people you talk to about choices is your child.

Ask Yourself

As you start to form an opinion about your child’s education, ask yourself:

• Why am I drawn to this approach?
• What are the pros and cons of this approach?
• What are my child’s thoughts and feelings about education?
• What does my spouse want to do?
• Do we have the resources necessary for this?
• Am I willing and able to do what is required? (This may not just apply to homeschooling, since many schools require parents to participate in the classroom.)

Don’t wait until a few months before it is time to start kindergarten to investigate schooling options. Give yourself as much time and exposure as possible so each member of your family has all of the information needed.

Beginning Homeschool Resources Online

• “Handbooks and Reading Lists,” Jon’s Homeschool Resources.
• A to Z Home’s Cool.

Image © Darja Vorontsova | Dreamstime.com

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Who is training our children to be good little consumers? We are. We give them money and encourage independent habits. This sounds great until you realize that this gives them the power that makes children so attractive to marketers. There they go.

Even as you build low-impact, natural family traditions for your children, you need to be aware of everything else they are facing. Be aware of how you may even be undermining your own efforts. You can’t ignore the commercialization of your children’s lives if you want them to resist a consumer lifestyle.

Children as Well-trained Consumers

Children are trained consumers at a very young age. Even if families participate in Buy Nothing Day and other anti-consumerism activities—or not quite consumerist activities like conscious consumption, various forms of ethical consumerism, and even Enoughism—most children have enough exposure to targeted marketing that they know exactly what to do. Children are integrated into their demographic, and they begin to ask for products by brand almost as soon as they can talk.

Why is so much marketing directed at children when there is such an outcry against commercialization of childhood? Because children spend or influence spending for more than half a trillion dollars a year. That’s more than $500 billion. Try that again and count the zeros: $500,000,000,000. Those zeros are the reason marketers target children.

As a market, children function in three ways:

• As direct consumers spending their own money.
• As influencers of adults who spend money.
• As a future market, all brand loyal and ready to buy once they have their own income.

So, what’s the problem with that? Aren’t we just preparing children for the reality of the consumer lifestyle? Not exactly. A British study found that children are depressed and anxious because of the pressures of consumerism. Consumerism is not a benign influence on our children. Commercialization hurts our children.

What were we thinking (besides all of those zeros)? Why did we let this commercial environment envelop our children in the past 20 or 30 or how many years? How long do you think it is, really? I certainly was raised smack in the middle of an advertising culture, and that was a lot of years ago. We might think of marketing to children as something new, but the roots go back more than a hundred years, according to Lisa Jacobson, author of Children and Consumer Culture in American Society: A Historical Handbook and Guide.

OK, already! We get it. Our children are bombarded. That much is absolutely clear.

What is a parent to do?

Your best defense is very simple: educate your children. They will be exposed to commercial messages in some form no matter how much you think you are limiting their exposure, so give them what they need to be their own best advocates.

Help children develop skills of media literacy. Help them understand the intent of advertising so they won’t be as likely to embrace advertisement as reality. Once they begin to understand the strategies used to market directly to them, they may find it fun to break down and discuss the meanings of advertising, product placement, commercial tie-ins, and so on. Let them begin to find the marketing themselves. The more you put the game of marketing in their hands, the more they will find (beyond what you probably even imagined), and the smarter they will get about their own consumption.

Critical thinking skills won’t be as helpful with the youngest children, though, because they just don’t have the capacity yet. Particularly in children under about age eight, the age at which they can begin to discern layers of meaning and less than admirable intentions, you just need to protect very young children from commercial abuses. Limit their exposure.

Need more ideas? Here are 50 ways to challenge commercialism.

Resources & Reading

If you want to know more about helping children avoid or deal with commercialization, marketing, and consumerism, here are a few resources that dive into the issues. A lot of individuals and organizations recognize the problem and are working to improve, combat, or just get around the problem.

About Kids’ Health. About Kids’ Health is a site sponsored by the Hospital for Sick Children or Sick Kids in Toronto. Their article, “Target Market: Children as Consumers,” seems most concerned about food marketing, but it also includes a great list of actions parents can take to protect children.

Campaign for a Commercial-free Childhood. The Campaign for a Commercial-free Childhood publishes guides, holds summits, and generally tries to put tools in the hands of those who can help children before they know they need help.

Center for Media Literacy. The Center for Media Literacy takes a proactive approach of teaching children media literacy from kindergarten to college. They have a big collection of articles and resources to guide you if you are ready to jump in.

Future of Children. The journal The Future of Children published an issue on Children and Electronic Media last year. Great place to go if you are looking for academic works on the subject.

Global Issues. Global Issues is a personal website with information gathered over years. The section on “Children As Consumers” has several informative sub-sections.

Media Education Foundation. The Media Education Foundation has created a series of documentary films on commercialization of childhood, including Consuming Kids: The Commercialization of Childhood. I’ve used some of their films in the classroom before, and I particularly like that they provide extensive resources to give their films context. This is the best list of resources I have seen on commercialization of childhood.

Media Lens. Media Lens offers an excerpt from the book This Little Kiddy Went To Market: The Corporate Capture Of Childhood by Sharon Beder. In their intro, they “invite you to imagine a world in which Beder’s work was “on every school curriculum”, as John Pilger recommends. Imagine if children were provided with tools of intellectual self-defence to counter the relentless campaigns of corporate manipulation. It is simultaneously depressing and heartening to consider how much happier, healthier, more compassionate our society would be as a result.” I especially like her section on exploiting the lack of cynicism in very young children, as if cynicism were an armor all of us need (which it probably is, sadly).

New American Dream. For a whole family, whole community approach to moving beyond consumption, see New American Dream.

Who Minds the Child? Who Minds the Child is a Canadian nonprofit raising awareness of the negative effects of consumerism and media on children and society. They advocate flat-out resistance to “the pathological pursuit of profit and power by the few and help create a healthy, sustainable world for the many.” The organization is influenced by research by Jenny Hill, which you can read in full on the site.

This post is for the Green Moms Carnival on Greener Traditions hosted in December by Green Phone Booth.

Image © Igor De | Dreamstime.com

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