Engaging Your Child: How You and Your Child Can Help With Plastic Pollution

Posted by Lazar M. on May 23rd, 2017

Reminding children that every day can be Earth Day gives any parent the perfect opportunity to speak to their kids about the human effect on the environment. Pacha’s Pajamas: A Story Written By Nature is a children’s environmental book presents different issues facing our world. It shows how a community can step up and make a difference, and  that even one small child can make a change that has real and lasting impact.

Plastic pollution is a real problem. Plastic should be recycled but instead, it is found scattered in nature both on land and in the water. With young kids, stories, such as Pacha’s Pajamas, can be a wonderful tool to help a child understand more scientific issues.

In this kid’s environmental book, Pacha has a dream. In her dream, she sees a whale in distress. The whale is frantically splashing around and yelling for help. Pacha does not know what is wrong but a kind hummingbird soon figures out the problem. The hummingbird buzzes over to the whale and pulls a plastic bag out of the whale’s blowhole! Pacha is shocked! She realizes that humans can have a major impact on marine life.

This passage is a good stepping stone for talking to your child about the effects that littering can have on animal life. You can discuss places you have seen plastic litter and the potential harm that this can cause animals where you live. Seeing things first hand and realizing that they can make a difference is very empowering to any child. Children have an innate instinct to help and when they start helping the environment at a young age it will carry into their adult life.

A good way to explain this to your child is to explain how places like the park, the ocean, and really, anywhere in nature are all habitats. So, if you throw a plastic bottle out of a car window it doesn’t just disappear, instead, it lands in someone else’s home. Talk to your child about how unhappy they would be if someone threw garbage in their bedroom!

Near the end of the children’s environmental story, Pacha has awoken from her dream with a desire to help the environment and spread the message of how human actions impact the animal world. She is in the park and sees a boy about her age drop a piece of plastic. She uses this as a way to start a conversation about plastic pollution as well as what she and her family are doing to prevent it.

This can be a good time to go over different scenarios with your child so they can practice what they would say in different situations. You can discuss the correct ways to approach someone who is littering and what the best words to use are.

Anytime you and your child do even one little thing, it can have a real lasting effect somewhere else and as all the little steps add up, a massive positive change can occur.

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