When six-and-a-half-year-old Ari Frenken’s class decided on a recycling challenge, he knew he was going to ace it. After all, he’s been doing it for years. The questions had come alongside a different challenge pre-COVID-19; the school had launched a bottle drive. It had piqued his interest and got him thinking about how his everyday behaviours affected the world. Could he make a difference or would it be a drop in an ocean of plastic?
His mum, Canadian expat Amberly Frenken-Metzler, explains that two years in, he’s become very passionate about living a sustainable life. “We walk to school or we ride our bike to school [which is 10 minutes away] every day, because he’ll say, ‘Oh, we should walk so we don’t use the car because it’s bad for the environment’.
“Leading a responsible, sustainable life is probably just something that you talk about more when you have kids – because you do have to teach it. It’s not something that they’ll know. One thing that I think people learn too late is that it is all of our responsibility.”
Here are her top tips on inculcating a love for living sustainably in kids:
1. Make them the boss of a situation: Giving them full responsibility of a task really works. Giving them the responsibility of saying, ‘This has to go here [in this bin] or that bin”, teaches accountability. “He’ll come to us and say, ‘Dad you put a can in the glass [bin]. Responsibility, I think, is key to teaching them about it,” says Frenken-Metzler.
2. Decorate the containers: You can decorate the recycling containers to make them more appealing, she explains. “We had one container at first, but now we we’ve started to separate the recyclables and then every Tuesday we’ll go to the recycling centre and drop them off. That’s a good chore [separating recyclables] that’s easy for very young kids and they get excited when they have all the responsibility.”
3. Help them make the connect: Making real-life connections that show them what the benefits are of recycling can really encourage thought. The two day trips that left a mark, recalls Frenken-Metzler, were Jumeirah Al Naseem Turtle Rehabilitation Sanctuary and Expo 2020’s Sustainability pavilion.
4. Set challenges: “Help them find something that they didn’t actually know could be recycled. Ari learned that cell phones and computers and electronics could be recycled, so he was so surprised about that,” she adds.
5. Reinforce the lesson with activities: She says, “Add different activities to incorporate a theme of responsibility. While we were doing his recycling challenge, for instance, we also went to the Solar Park and we saw other ways in which we could help the environment.
6. Make it fun: With activities and rewards.
7. Real-life applications are important: “If Ari asks me a question [about the environment], I tell him, okay, yes watch a video and then see what you can do,” she says.
People underestimate children they don’t think they can understand topics such as sustainability, says Frenken-Metzler, but if you give them the responsibility they are excited to do it. And then if you give them real-world connections, then it makes them meaningful.
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