A Lightbulb Moment

“You can wear your jeans more than once before you toss them in the laundry,” I remember my mom telling me this when I was a preteen. At the time I thought that it was a gross concept—wearing clothes more than once. Ew. I also thought that she was just being difficult, because, you know, when you’re 12, you’re convinced your mom is out to embarrass you or make your life miserable.

I now know that my mother was just being frugal about water and energy use, in her refusal to wash my jeans after one wearing. Why? Because my mother’s voice has been coming out of my mouth lately, as I tell Jane and Annie, “You know, if your pants aren’t dirty or don’t have food on them, you can wear them again. You don’t have to toss them in the laundry.” To which they both reply, “Ew. Wear clothes two days in a row? Gross.”

This is the reality of reduce, recycle and reuse when you’re a parent. It’s one thing to know that doing fewer and shorter loads of laundry can help cut your bills—and the use of the earth’s resources, especially if you’ve got energy-efficient appliances. But it’s another thing when you try to tell this to an eye-rolling preteen who loves the smell of fresh-out-of-the-dryer jeans, even though she’d only worn them for six hours the previous day before tossing them in the laundry—or in the case of my eldest daughter, on the floor of the bathroom.

This has become one of the biggest challenges with living our new frugal and green lifestyle—explaining it to the kids. They’ve picked up so many other positive lessons from us, such as how wearing seatbelts saves lives (they demand I buckled up the dog whenever he rides in the car with us) and not to smoke. They even question us when we have a glass of wine with dinner and want us to swear that we won’t be doing any driving for the rest of the night.

But this whole saving money and energy thing? It’s almost too out there for them. Maybe what we need to do is have them sit with us the next time we pay our bills and let them see just how much we spend a month on electric and gas. Perhaps seeing those numbers in black and white might help these brain synapses make the connection of, “Gee, if I really do turn out the lights when I leave my bedroom, mom and dad won’t have to pay hundreds of dollars each month to PECO.”

Then again, maybe a better way to make the point is not to rush to replace any burned out lightbulbs in their room. When they wonder why it’s do dark in there, I can say something like, “Well, since you left your lights on so much, the lightbulbs burned out, and I don’t have any bulbs to replace them.” Big lie, I know. But seriously, if I could then turn it into a game—who can make the lightbulb last longer—it would be interesting to see if they would then buy into this notion of “The last one out, please close the lights.”