America's eco-kids keep a keen eye on their parents

Sometimes, Jennifer Ross feels she cannot make a move at home without inviting the scorn of her daughters, Grace, 10, and Eliza, 7. The car she thrust? A flagrant polluter. The bath at night to help her relax? A wasteful indulgence. The reusable shopping bags she forgot, again? Tsk, tsk.

"I have very, very environmentally conscious kid - more so than me, I'm embarrassed to say," said Ross, a sociable worker in Dobbs Ferry, New York. "They're on my case about acquiring a loanblend car. They want me to replace all the light bulbs in the house with energy-saving bulbs."

Ross's kid are part of what experts say is a growth army of "eco-kids" - steeped in environmentalism at school, in houses of worship, through exploratory survey and even via popular culture - who try to hold their parents accountable at home. Amid their pride in their kid's zeal for all things green, the grown-ups sometimes end up feeling like scofflaws under the watchful eye of the pint-size eco-police, whose demands grow ever greater, and more expensive.

They pore over refuse bins in hunt of errant recyclables. They lobby for solar panels. And, in a generational about-face, they turn off the visible light after their parents leave empty rooms.

"Kids have truly turned into the little conscience posing in the back seat," said Julia Bovey, a spokeswoman for the Natural Resources defence Council, a lead environmental group that late worked with jukebox on a series of populace service announcements and other scheduling called "Big Green Help."

"One of the fascinating things about kid is that they don't offprint what you are doing from what you should be doing," Bovey said. "Here's this info about how we can help the environment, and kids are not able to rationalize it away the way that adults do."

In Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, Jan Schmidt, a stay-at-home mother, and Mark Goetz, a professor of furniture design, have watched, amazed, as their 4-year-old son chastises them for letting the water run while they brush their teeth. "He'll come over and turn it off and say, 'Every day is Earth Day,"' Schmidt said. "He learned it at school."

Their older child, Elly, 12, extols the clothesline in her bedroom the way other girls her age might show off a new beanbag chair. An aspiring marine biologist, Elly raised $250 last year to protect coral reefs by selling handmade earrings at school. And she was a big factor in the family's decision to hang on to their current car instead of buying a bigger one.

"With Elly, there's sort of an unspoken thing about not buying an SUV," Schmidt said.

Elly elaborated: "I wouldn't be happy if they bought an SUV because they're not fuel efficient, and they pollute more than other cars."

They learn this stuff everywhere. In the summer, the Pixar film "Wall-E" served up an ecological parable of a planet so punished that it had to be abandoned. The Girl Scouts recently added uniform patches for participating in programs including "Environmental Health," "Get With the Land," "Earth Pact" and "Water Drop."

Scholastic, the global children's publishing, education and media company, has teamed up with the American Museum of Natural History to create Web sites and magazines about climate change and other environmental issues.

A Scholastic message board where children share eco-friendly tips, called Save the Planet, has had three million page views in the past year.

And school districts across the United States are adding lessons on the environment to their curriculums in many subject areas, as well as enforcing idle-free zones in school driveways, switching to plant-based cleaners, doing away with pesticides and, in some places, installing solar panels.

In the Byram Hills School District in Armonk, New York, middle-school teachers plan to roll out new material related to the environment starting in January.

"We're trying to integrate it into anything where it naturally fits," said Jackie Taylor, the district's superintendent. "It might be in a math lesson. How much water are you really using? How can you tell? Teachers look for avenues in almost everything they teach."

But the green initiatives in schools have not been universally embraced. Some critics say such lessons are a distraction as districts struggle to meet minimum standards on math and reading tests. Others say turning children into stewards of the environment is an inappropriate use of taxpayer money.

And even parents who are impressed by their children's commitment to remake the world can also sometimes feel, well, badgered. Paul Wyckoff, a writer in Hunterdon County, New Jersey, said his son Will, 15, yells at him for "leaving the car idling for a few seconds in the driveway." He has even taken to turning off nightlights to save energy.