by Margaret Shauers

Created on: March 23, 2009

Water Conservation for Children

Children mostly learn from parents from what they see, not from what they are told. If you want your children to conserve water, you must learn to conserve it yourself and show by example. Then you can demand they do the same. Most of this article will be about how I learned to conserve water more than 60 years ago in an always "-dry" state.

I grew up on a farm in the Midwest where it is dry and where there was no electricity in those days to help things along. We carried every drop of water we used from a "windmill" fed water system at least 500 feet away from the house. No indoor plumbing at that time in rural America!

We carried all water from the windmill daily. It did have a hand pump for the few days in Kansas when there was no wind energy supplying it. This included winter as well as summer. We used and reused what water we carried in two (heavy!) buckets because that balanced better and avoided back problems.

Water was tested every year, even back then when there were few pollutants in ground water. It was safe to drink. Drinking water was stored in jugs and none was wasted due to faucets running longer than one planned. Because no one likes "stale" water, what wasn't used for drinking was poured into basins for general washing up.... hands, face, etc. On a farm, both get extremely grimy.

Once used, the cleansing water was poured into vegetable, flower gardens and grass even in winter on frozen ground. Eventually, the water soaked into the soil.

Major water usages, like baths and laundry water, also were hand carried. No one wasted that water, for sure! It took too many muscles to carry it, although I expect we were all healthier for the exercise.

I personally don't recommend the old-time practice of children being bathed first in the heated water (yes, it also had to be heated 60 years ago in far reaches of rural states), then being reused for any adult women and again for the males who had farm dirt, grease and other tough-work grime. True, another bucket of heated water was dumped in along the way, but let's face it; this was a great way to pass along colds, flu and viruses.

Even today, however, bathtubs don't need to be even nearly full for a proper wash. And, while baths take more water than most showers, you can do what we did long ago and re-use the leftover bathwater or at least most of it. Everything used in a shower goes down the drain unless you want to stand in a cooling puddle. Bathwater can be scooped out and used

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