This is my last post this week about Christopher Gavigan’s Healthy Child Healthy World: Creating a Cleaner, Greener, Safer Home. To conclude this family friendly green guide, Gavigan leaves us with a feeling of hope. “It’s All Good” is a chapter that eases all the anxiety we might feel when we confront all the hazards and risks that we did not know about.
“Not knowing” may mean that we might not recognize that lead poisoning is a possibility for ourselves and our children even if we do not live in an old home; as Gavigan points out in Healthy Child Healthy World: Creating a Cleaner, Greener, Safer Home, we track lead and other poisons into our homes when we wear our shoes inside and do not wipe our feet on a doormat. Not knowing about the potential health risks and sadly the alarming outcomes that surround us in our communities and homes is dangerous and scary.
Fortunately, we’re completely capable of becoming informed and making good, healthful decisions for our families and children. In “It’s All Good,” Gavigan outlines easy, practical steps parents can take to learn and do more for the health of their homes. For starters, he recommends surfing the web to learn more about a given health subject, for example, lead poisoning or soil contamination. He also suggests being mindful about what products we purchase and to pay attention to their labels. Many diet gurus advocate food logs for clients hoping to lose weight; Gavigan recommends keeping a product log to help consumers take back control over their homes, and ultimately, their lives. Other easy steps to take are those that we in the green minded world take for granted because we hear it so often: reuse, reduce, recycle, repurpose, etc.
Basically, being in the know can help us to raise healthier children, which is a great gift to them. Again, I can’t say how indispensable it is for us, as parents, to do something about protecting our environment. I think this is what Gavigan is getting at. If we make environmental choices in our homes, for our families, and choose green on a day to day basis, we are doing something, and that something can have long reaching results for generations to come.
