Essential Newborn Care Protocol: a Must Know for Parents and Would-Be Parents

Official Earth Day activities in the Philippines were postponed by the government to April 25, Monday, to accord due attention to it as the annual date of April 22 coincided this year with Good Friday, one of the most important religious holidays of the country.

While the move is commendable, I would like to emphasize the need for us parents to go beyond the one-hour Earth Hour or the one-day Earth Day activities and do the right thing every day so that our generation would be able to bequeath to our children a better world than what we inherited from our parents. Such call for action was trumpeted about a year and a half ago in a blog post to highlight the International Day of Climate Action.

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In the same blog, I listed my top five concrete and practical actions that parents can do to help mitigate climate change.  The following is a quick rundown:

1. Reduce energy consumption.  This is the concrete action that was promoted in the Earth Hour.  It has an immediate positive impact to the wallet on top of contributing to the long-term sustainability of our planet.
2. Eat less meat, more vegetables.  This action had to do with the energy requirements to produce meat as animals are secondary consumers that lose energy as heat, thus inefficient in converting biomass from plants.  We also get the health benefits of eating more vegetables, nuts and fruits, while lowering the risks of certain cancers and lifestyle diseases by reducing meat in our diet.  You might even wanna go for an ecologically sound alternative to eating meat as protein source-- entomophagy.
3. Buy local foods and products.  It's not just getting the freshest food on your table, but also helping the local economy become self-sufficient.  This concrete action minimizes energy expenditure due to transport and packaging.
4. Travel less, travel efficiently.  Working closer to home has the obvious advantages of lowering fuel expenses and pollution.  But more important to parents is the time that can be spent with the family or doing more worthwhile activities rather than commuting to and from office.
5. Educate, communicate.  This concrete action not only plants the seeds to better citizenship in our children and community, but also forces us to spend time talking to them. It's a great topic to discuss during dinner where everyone can contribute his/her own ideas.

To read the full arguments for the above listed concrete actions, click this link to the original article "Concrete actions parents can do to help mitigate climate change".

The benefits of the above recommended concrete actions that anybody, particularly parents, can do is at least two-fold in that the positive impacts are both in the short- and long-term. Moreover, these are actions that can be done every day and not needing any special events, venues, skills, tools, group or expenses to do. In fact, we can do it on our own. But our individual actions have a huge impact if more of us do it every day.

So please share this information to family and friends so they, too, may adopt these practical steps/actions to save our planet. You may do so by clicking on the "like" or "tweet" buttons below, or sharing it via email or reposting it in your Facebook or blog.