Automatic Doors and Bad Parenting skills

Dear Blog Readers,

Yesterday I promised to share a pet peeve with you and I will after I make a statement that is part of my truth:

It is paramount to do what we can to conserve energy in order to train ourselves and our children to live more responsibly and sustainability on this planet. As a benefit, many of the small things we can do to conserve energy require more use of our physical bodies thus burning more calories and helping to solve another crisis in the US- obesity.

Now the peeve story:

I belong to a wonderful community center. It serves a variety of people in a variety of ways. One of which is daycare for pre-school and school aged children. Another is several support groups and activities for senior citizens. It is a great place and I love that my family is a part of this community.

I visit the community center about five times a week. Almost every time I go there is a parent with a small child encouraging their child to hit the blue handicapped access button and open the door electronically. This infuriates me because 1) it uses electricity un-necessarily, 2) It trains the child to use the automatic door rather than to open the door manually which is part of the problem with the mindset of our culture.

It is great that the door can open electronically when a parent is struggling with a stroller or has their hands full and the child is too small to bear the weight of the door needing to use it. But really! Is it necessary to propagate this laziness for fun? I even hear parents providing positive reinforcement to the button pushers. We do not have to use the electronic door opener just because it is there. We can choose to act responsibly by not using it unless we have too.

Conservation challenge for today: Open the door with your own strength if you can and encourage your children to do the same.

Benefit: Children can learn the proper way to open the door for their elders (pull the door open and step behind the opened door to let an adult pass) which empowers them with social responsibility and old fashioned manners. It might also decrease the number of times elderly or handicapped people have to use the electronic door opener.

Other benefit: A simple way to reduce energy consumption. Burn a few more calories.

Yet another benefit: less wear and tear on the electronic door opening system which translates to less repairs and less cost.