One of the hardest things to do is to get teenage girls to turn off the lights when they leave a room. I should know. I have two teenage girls.
Every night when they go to bed, I walk around the house turning off lights and sometimes even the TV. In those rare instances when they are up later than I am, I wake up to some lights on in the house. Every morning after they go off to school, I go around turning off lights and the hair straightener.
What else can I do? Yelling won’t help. Pleading won’t help. Explaining the benefits won’t help. These are kids trying to be independent and living with their own history tests, boys, and what she said to her yesterday.
But… I have two younger girls who are currently on a sticker reward program for not getting into the teenagers’ stuff: make up, clothes, hair brushes, and whatever else teenage girls have. Maybe a sticker reward system would work with them as well? And after a week of turning off their lights by themselves, I can give them a reward. The only reward they care about is money, and I am fine with that. If they get the habit of turning off lights, I figure I can save us some money.
If anyone else has some ideas on how to get teenage girls to turn off lights, I am all ears.
Trouble is, with the new CFL bulbs (now mandated to be the ONLY bulbs by 2010) replacing standard incandescent – it actually shortens the lifespan of the bulb to turn them off! Crazy, I know. So, you’ll have to teach your daughters to turn off your old bulbs, but make certain the new ones are left on for at least thirty minutes before flicking them out so as not to wear out the toxic-mercury switches.
Neat stuff, these new lights!
One of the things I notice more and more. People leave tv on, computers on, when they are not using it. It is a mutch bigger problem. There are a bunch of devices that never turn off such as the cable boxes.