You may have noticed that green is the new black when it comes to raising babies these days. A swing back to cloth nappies and wooden toys shows that parents are starting to question the impact their families are making on the environment.
Journalist and yoga teacher Debbie Hodgson (pictured right) has written a guide for parents keen to move towards a more sustainable and less commercial lifestyle with her new book Sustainable Baby. We spoke to her about why having a child forces you to examine your environmental impact – and whether it really is possible for busy urban parents to switch to cloth and make their own baby food. – Amber Robinson
Were you always a greenie, or did having kids make you re-think your lifestyle?
I come from the country so I know a little bit about where our water comes from and where our food comes from , but I wasn’t a rabid environmentalist. Becoming a parent made the vague idea that it’s a good thing to conserve the environment into a very immediate feeling. Suddenly we were talking about the future of my child, and I think that’s a really common experience with parents, that they do become environmentalists when they have children because they suddenly see their world through their child’s eyes.
Modern parents are so busy, often both parents are working and their weekends are full of activities. Is it too much to ask to switch back to cloth nappies and cook own baby food?
The lifestyle many families live or have lived up to now (I think it’s changing a bit) everything is go go go. We need to get a bigger house, we need to make more money, we need to go on more extravagant holidays… not many people are prepared to put that on hold when they’ve got children. For people that are, it’s not such a stretch to use cloth nappies. I think I wrote in the book, once you’ve got your system going it should take less than 10 minutes a day. That’s a conservative estimate, it could take even less.
But I hope my book doesn’t come across as ‘everyone has to use cloth nappies, everybody has to cook their own baby food”. I hope it comes across as ‘here are some options, here are some alternatives’.
I know lots of people who do it who work full time. It’s a challenge, but there’s also options, like part time cloth. Using cloth at home but disposables when you’re out.
If you’re using disposables there are ways you can reduce your environmental impact. You can use washable wipes, you can use reusable wipes, you can reduce how many nappies you use by getting the baby to toilet into a container rather than into the nappy… there are lots of options.
If you can’t give up disposable nappies, what about some other ways to reduce your impact? My book provides chapters on other things you can do. It’s important to look at the overall footprint of your house. You could reduce it in a huge way by getting rid of a car. It doesn’t have to be all about nappies.
The thing with cloth nappies is that the lingo is so confusing, as I wrote about it in my blog last week.
When I had my baby I never even considered using cloth nappies and I wasn’t in an environment where anyone used them. My son was 5 months old when I got my first cloth nappy and I thought, ‘what the hell do I do with this?’ I took it home and did a bit of research and realised that I was going to need a cover and that one wasn’t going to be enough, I needed a few! I really knew nothing. My background’s in journalism, so when I don’t get something I exhaustively research it until I do. By the time I got it, I had so many hours behind me, I thought this all needs to be collated in to one place, which made me want to write the book.
In your book you have some nice ideas for homemade toys and activities for babies. Do you think parents are conned in to buying too many toys for their kids? I feel like my house is full of plastic.
Plastic is an incredibly useful substance and it’s fantastic for kitchen utensils — which is why kitchen utensils make great toys because they can’t break them!
My toddler has a cupboard in the kitchen and everything that can’t be broken goes in there, that’s his little area where he can cook and he can tidy, he can imitate what I’m doing. You don’t need to buy a plastic kitchen, I mean they’re cute… but they’re just kitchens. Whereas with a cupboard, you can pull everything out of them and use them for something completely different, like to display a rock collection, which is what my son’s really into at the moment.
So I really think that not just talking about plastic, but custom made toys, they’re very limited in that you buy them and the child has to use them for that one purpose. Not only are they unsustainable because once that purpose has passed you have to throw it out, it also doesn’t grow with the child. Developmentally, it’s better to have something that can grow with a child.
In the book I wrote about a piece of wood we had that was gnarled and really interestingly shaped. For my 18-month-old it was an elephant that he rode on. Then we had a four- year-old visit and for him it was a motorbike. So it adapts to where the child’s at and what their interests are.
I think for children, what I’ve come to realise is that more than toys its more interesting to have spaces for them. What my little boy loves are cubbies and places to hide away and take histoys to play. You can make one out of a sheet hung over two chairs or pull the sofa out from the wall so that they can crawl behind it. The great thing is that you haven’t added to what’s in your house already, you haven’t had to buy anything.
If families wanted to make a few changes to become more sustainable what would you recommend?
Draw an imaginary line around your house, and think about what comes in and what comes out.. what’s the footprint? What are you using? That includes overseas holidays and car trips. That would be the first thing I would do, then evaluate where you are prepared to cut down.
You could sell your second car and send your kids to the local school walking distance away – that would make a big impact.
One of my favourite small tips is to not flush the toilet so often, I’m not talking number 2s! Have a compost bin or worm farm if you live in an apartment. Use the worm castings to grow vegetables in containers. It’s a great way to introduce your child to the idea that food needs to be grown, it’s a great way to get your kids to eat veges too. You start to realise what’s in season and what’s grown locally.
If you live near a co-op buy grains and staples with your own packaging. If you grow your own veges and buy at a co-op, you only need to take your bins once a month, and that’s a great feeling!
Think twice about buying new clothes. There are a lot of good quality clothes just sitting in second hand shops and op shops. I think they need to be rotated around more. The cotton industry is a huge user of resources.
Sustainable Baby is available from the ABC Store for $AU24.95. Read more about Debbie and sustainability at her blog.
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