Helping a child get rid of wasteful habits

(Image from Pixabay)


"That's wasteful."

I heard my mom say those two words when I was a kid more times than I could count. Now, I find myself saying it to my own daughter.

My husband reminds her to turn off the light whenever she leaves a room, and she needs lots of reminders.

I have been tackling how much water she uses at bath time. When she first started taking a bath by herself, my daughter was pretty good with the amount of water she used, but at some point, my husband and I noticed that we've been hearing her start and stop the water more than once. Who knows how long she had been doing that before we noticed? Judging by the size of our water bills, I'd say it was probably four months.

So I asked her about it. It turns out she was running fresh water for three reasons:
  1. To rinse herself off. Apparently, she had been using so much soap that the water was too soapy to rinse herself.
  2. To rinse out the tub. Her dad is usually the first one to use the tub/shower after my daughter is done. Several times he's gotten on to her for how slippery the tub has been. Rather than use less soap, it seems, she thought the best solution was to rinse the tub.
  3. To wash her hair with cold water. She had seen on YouTube that rinsing your hair with cold water will make it shinier and smoother.
I told her that if she was using enough soap that both she and the tub needed an extra rinsing, she was using too much.  And as far as her hair goes, I told her YouTubers don't know everything and that someone as young as she is needs only to wash their hair to make it shiny and smooth.

Since we had our talk, I haven't noticed her running extra water. I'm hopeful we've got that taken care of and our water bill will return to normal.

And I'm keeping an eye out for other wasteful habits, not just hers, but mine and her dad's as well.

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