The Eco-Friendly Baby: How Choosing Green Products Can Benefit Your Child’s Health and Future

Babies need more than loving attention. Babies need stuff! Babies arrive entirely dependent on their parents to equip them for life on earth. And life on earth is increasingly focused on sustainability as both an individual and a collective responsibility. So, your baby is arriving at a pivotal time in human history.

In that spirit, let’s talk about choosing green products that can benefit your child’s health and future. Raising an eco-friendly baby isn’t as difficult as you might think. Raising your baby sustainably is becoming easier as products and services turn toward giving the planet a much-needed break from our unhealthy disposable culture.

The Future Is Your Baby’s

All parents have big plans for their newborns. But there’s one factor more important than any other for determining the quality of the future: the environment. It may seem a massive undertaking — this “saving the planet” business — but if you’re expecting or have just welcomed a new baby, then it’s your business. The future is your baby’s, and it’s your sacred mission to ensure they inherit a livable planet.

Worldwide, people are discovering healthier, more eco-friendly ways to raise children. Making more sustainable choices in your life and parenting style is easier than ever, so give your children the gift of making those crucial choices intentionally. In this article, you’ll read about sustainable solutions and ideas for making them part of raising your baby consciously.

Breastfeeding and Sustainable Pumps

Breastfeeding is acknowledged as the best start to a baby’s life. And women are built for it! But it’s important, when talking about breastfeeding and its health benefits, to remember that not all women can breastfeed. Conditions like mastitis can prevent women from fulfilling this facet of childrearing, but some can still pump and reserve milk. And if that’s not possible and you don’t like the idea of commercial baby formula, there are alternatives too!

Pumping breast milk is an alternative for some women due to health conditions that preclude breastfeeding and necessary absences from their babies for work. Thankfully, there are many sustainable pumps for expressing and storing milk. Choose a pump made from silicone to avoid introducing harmful chemicals that can leach from plastic pumps. Breastfeeding improves the health of both mother and child, but when it’s not possible, there are viable alternatives, including breast milk-sharing networks.

Dressing Your Eco-Friendly Baby

Babies grow like a weed! One minute, you’re carrying them in your arms; the next, they’re up and toddling, which means a constant and rapid evolution in your child’s clothing needs. Like other clothes, baby clothing is a burden on the world’s landfills. Your eco-friendly baby has plenty of options, though, as parents take sustainability into their own hands.

One option is clothing exchange. You can set one up with friends, nearby neighbors, or at a local community center. A clothing exchange provides a source of infant, toddler, and children’s clothing, reducing both consumption and your investment in clothes they grow out of way too quickly. And you get to meet other environmentally conscious parents while keeping your baby’s clothes out of landfills!

There’s also a burgeoning market for eco-friendly baby shoes, rompers, and everything else you need for your baby as more parents demand sustainable solutions in retail. Combine strategies to create the perfect conditions to clothe your baby in eco-friendly green for a healthier future!

Greening Your Diapers

Disposable diapers are a tremendous environmental challenge. They’re also full of toxins that pose health risks to your baby. Never mind that landfills all over the world are stuffed with disposable diapers. While eventually biodegradable in an open environment, diapers take 500 years to decompose when dumped in a landfill. Factor in the petrochemicals used and the 200,000 trees cut down each year to manufacture disposable diapers, and it’s a problem.

Unfortunately, 95% of US families still use disposables, but you can be part of changing that. Greening your diapers is a sustainable solution being turned to by environmentally conscious families worldwide. Your eco-friendly baby’s reusable diapers greatly help fight for healthier babies and a happier environment.

Eco-Friendly High Chairs

Many of today’s furniture is made to be turned over every several years and is almost disposable—including children’s furniture—and ends up in landfills and dumps. Many high chairs on the market are made predominantly from plastic, which, of course, contains toxins. While this fact has been known for some time, toxic baby furniture is still out there.

But as conscious consumers demand, the market responds. Instead of manufacturing a chair usable for only a brief period of a child’s life, one company has created an adjustable high chair for adulthood. This eco-friendly high chair is fashioned of wood, convertible, and intended to follow your baby through life as a permanent place to sit. There’s nothing healthier than a friend for life! And nothing is more eco-friendly than durability.

Home Cooking for Your Eco-Friendly Baby

Parents have long turned to baby food to help babies jump from breast or bottle to solid food. But baby food producers are under increasing scrutiny for the quality of their products. Investigations reveal low nutritional value in these prepared foods and high sugar and sodium content.

The most eco-friendly solution is to create your baby food. It's easy to prepare, and you control the nutritional content. What you’ll feed your baby also hasn’t been industrially heated to prevent bacterial contamination, which impacts nutrient quality. When you give your baby the healthy food they need to become strong and resilient, you add support to their future health and keep packaging out of the local landfill!

Lasting, Interactive Toys

The toy consumer market is awash with toxicity, disability, and poor design. Toys are not recyclable due to the varying materials they’re made from. They also break easily and end up in landfills too often. There’s a better way to entertain children than with ephemeral plastic toys.

Toys made from wood and metal and well-made plush toys are better choices than anything made of plastic. The world of children’s toys, while still alarming environmentalists with its tremendous turnover, is changing. Upward pressure from independent and online providers creates a market for more long-lasting, interactive baby toys.

Toys encouraging children to write stories while inventing fanciful characters and scenarios build problem-solving and reasoning skills. By interacting with toys that stimulate their imaginations, your child develops the complex intellectual functions necessary for a healthy life! Lasting, interactive toys become a legacy, surviving childhood to entertain the next generation!

Be the Change

Being the change you want to see seems like a smaller undertaking when you realize your baby’s future depends on it. Your actions today make the future brighter for the little ones now coming up. When millions of us take these actions, the change is well underway!

Choosing green products can benefit your child’s health and future in myriad ways. Every eco-friendly move you make on your child’s behalf is a love note to that future and a sign of hope. Here’s to your eco-friendly baby’s healthy, happy future, living on a planet nurtured to support it!