When you’re running a household and raising a family, sustainability is something that just happens to you. Between balancing the budget and teaching your children not to be wasteful, it’s only natural to start thinking about sustainability and working together to reduce waste. Most parents don’t actually want to raise their children with a disposable mentality, constantly buying cheap items and throwing them away instead of finding sturdy options to keep well maintained. Parents send their kids to school with sturdy reusable water bottles, invest in washable supplies, and teaching their children to find creative uses for seemingly ‘used up’ items. But what about children’s clothes? Here is a great collection if ways to resuse children’s clothes in fun ways with your kids.
Sustainability in Children’s Clothing
Clothing is something that even the most sustainable and eco-friendly parents can overlook because it’s so personal. Naturally, you want you and your children to dress well in durable, comfortable clothing that is both stylish and circumstantially appropriate. To do this, most of us have been trained from an early age to head straight for the department store to buy something new that will (hopefully) last a few years. However, buying and keeping children’s clothes isn’t like adult clothes. Kids grow fast and they grow out of their clothes often faster than it takes for the clothes to wear out.
Your daughter’s favorite dress from last year was kept clean and pressed in her closet but it doesn’t fit this year. Your son goes through an unexpected growth spurt and the jeans that were big on him six months ago are now waders. As a sustainable parent, naturally you’re not going to toss perfectly good clothes, so what do you do? Do you donate, sell, or hand them down to another parent with kids about the right size?
The Hand-Me-Down Tradition
When you think about it, not all children’s clothes come to parents brand new. Adult siblings, both with children, will often form a cousin-hand-me-down network in which the older kids pass down their outgrown but still good quality clothes to younger cousins and older siblings pass down their clothes to younger siblings. When you run out of younger relatives, the clothes can go to the church, family friends, the local clothing drives, or a Goodwill. Really nice used children’s clothes can even be sold at consignment shops. The key is to realize that if you’re not bothered by cousin and sibling hand-me-downs, then there’s also no problem joining the non-family sustainable parent network by buying your children used clothes to start with.
Perks of Used Children’s Clothing
The primary draw of creating a network of sharing used children’s clothes is avoiding spending more money than necessary or throwing out perfectly good clothes, but there are also other perks that your kids will appreciate. The Hand-me-down process, oddly enough, is actually a great way to filter out only the best garments and provide your kids with a sturdier and more comfortable selection than they could have picked up for the same price at the local Walmart.
Used Clothes are Softer
To start with, brand new clothes tend to have scratchy seams and tags, and they are sometimes still soaked in the dyes and production chemicals used to make them fold nicely in the store. Used children’s clothes have been worn and washed a few times which softens the seams and ensures that your kids aren’t exposed to factory chemicals. Some even have the scratchy tags already conveniently cut out.
Only the Strong Survive
Have you ever purchased a shirt or pants for your child only to see the garment coming apart in the next few months? Flimsy clothing production is yet another product of the disposable consumer mentality, but these shoddy examples don’t make it onto the hand-me-down network from family or used clothing stores because they don’t survive. Only sturdy, better-constructed clothes last long enough to be hand-me-downs, meaning that you can find a much more reliable supply of sturdy clothes for your kids by focusing on second-hand clothing.
A History of Play
Finally, while you’d mostly prefer that your hand-me-downs are prefectly clean, a few marker spots, paint splatters, or jeans doodles can actually enhance how much your child enjoys the clothing. If another child has clearly had a great time playing in the clothes, but the garments still nice-looking, wash clean, and are hole-free, this can make for great designated play-time or arts-and-crafts outfits without paying an arm & leg for cartoon-embossed items.
Paying it Forward
Finally, every sustainable parent can become a two-way addition to the hand-me-down network. Just as your kids will can benefit from soft, clean, sturdy second-hand clothing, they will also inevitably grow out of their clothes before the garments have been worn significantly. If you’re looking to help out other parents dress their kids comfortably, affordably, and sustainably, don’t forget to find ways to continue handing good quality used children’s clothes down the line. There are even pickup services if you put together a large collection to be donated back into the hand-me-down system.
