Communication between mothers and children about environmental issues (a study about the role of mothers to educate their children on keeping a clean environment)

For the last two decade, many studies about environmental issues show that interpersonal communication plays an important role. Interpersonal communication is very useful and strategic to involve people to take part on this issue, particularly on how people deal with waste management (how to keep a clean environment). By using interpersonal communication approach at the micro level, this can lead us to identify and understand more about the whole elements of communication process (communicator, receiver, message, medium (channel), and effect) when we need to deal with the environmental issues. Based on what I observed about the communicator’s role in this paper, I argue that mothers have significant role to educate their children to keep a clean environment. This paper aims to explain the role of mothers on how they educate the children to keep a clean environment. This study use in-depth interview to 5 mothers who have children in Jakarta, Bogor, Depok. The data will be analyzed by thematic analysis. The findings indicate, to educate the children about keeping a clean environment, mothers needs to communicate interpersonally by using some examples, personal experiences, personal values, and certain media to discuss about this issue to their children.


Introduction
In the past few decades, the issue of the environment has become one of the important global issues; besides the issue of poverty and hunger eradication, education, health, gender empowerment, etc. Those things can be found in the Millennium Development Goals, set by the United Nations (UN) in 2000-2015 (1). Furthermore, the organization stated that environmental issues become an important priority in some of indicators in SDGs -Sustainable Development Goals (2). This paper will contribute to SDGs especially in some aspects such as sustainability in education [SDG #4], women and sustainability [SDG #5 and #17].
Generally, the issue of the environment is in a broad spectrum, ranging from maintaining environmental cleanliness (including land, river, sea and air), clean water procurement, natural resources saving (e.g. water and energy [electricity]), global warming, climate change, pollution, and so on. In short, environmental issues are important to consider because the physical environment is the habitat for humans and other living things that are depending each other, over a long period of time.
In the last two decades, a number of studies have shown that communication studies play an important role in a series of studies on the environment; especially studies of environmental communication. This study provides space to perform the education function (providing knowledge), persuasion, collaboration and advocacy with other individuals/organizations to create a healthy or proper environment to be inhabited by other individuals or living things. Practically, in the perspective of the communication process, the issue of environmental management will involve communication elements such as communicators (senders/ recipients), messages or content of communication (verbal and nonverbal symbols, meaning, etc), media used, and communication effects (3) (4) (5) (6). This paper starts from a micro level in observing environmental issues -i.e., how individuals maintain and create a clean environment (especially in waste management). Concerning to that, this paper aims to explain the role of mother -as communicator (educator who provide education to children) in maintaining or keeping the clean environment.
The selection of this topic is based on the author's observation of a number of cases in everyday life, which shows that the mother is a key figure who plays an important role for children to maintain good behavior in every daily activities, including how to maintain the environmental cleanliness. Therefore, the researcher argues that mother has a strategic role to form children's behavior in protecting the environment -especially how individuals manage waste at their social context. This could be done if the interpersonal communication between mothers and children takes place (7). DeVito stated, interpersonal communication is a process that takes place between or among connected persons or those involved in a close relationship (8).
Culturally, the role of care and education of children is inherent in the mother in the process of setting values in the family. Although the process of setting values also involves other in the family, but in most situations, the role of the mother is dominant in instilling values for the child. In this context, the intended values are values related to things that are considered important to be attached to daily life. Those include social values (in relation to social interaction), cultural values (related to the rules/cultural norms that exist in the family) and personal values or individual values (values inherent in an individual which are the result of the interaction of social values as well as cultural values and personal values that exist).
The study will explain the following research questions, i.e.: 1. What is the role of mother in addressing the environmental issues in everyday life? 2. How does mother know about environmental issues? What media that she use to get the knowledge? 3. How does mother socialize knowledge about environmental issues? 4. What activities that a mother does to give knowledge about maintaining environmental cleanliness to her children?

Literature review
In 2001, Hudson (9) wrote that as we enter a new century, environmental educators must come up with new knowledge and techniques that address the demands of social and technological landscape, while ensuring that environmental education stays relevant to the community. These challenges to environmental education required that we must reexamine the way we communicate environmental information to the public. Nowadays, it is important to focus on communication approach to understand and deliver the messages about environmental issues. In line with this, the needs of collaborative research between environmental studies and communication science is a must (10). This study explain the role of mothers in communicating the environmental issues interpersonally to her children, so that they could have sufficient knowledge and practice to keep a clean environment. Some studies about behavioral change issues shows that the interpersonal communication in family/individual level play a strategic way to change people's behavior to a better situation (11). In addition, Meeusen stated that the role of family considered to be powerful in transmitting knowledge, values and practice to the whole family members (12).

Research methods
This study is a descriptive study that uses a qualitative approach (13) (14). In order to collect data, I use in-depth interviews (with interview guidelines) on a number of informants (5 mothers). The selection of informants was done purposively to get the appropriate informants. The data obtained in this interview were analyzed thematically.
In determining the informants, there are a number of criteria in this study, namely, 1) mothers who have elementary school children (assuming that the elementary school age child is able to communicate verbally and can understand the message from the mother -especially those related to messages about how to maintain environmental cleanliness), 2) communicating ways to maintain environmental cleanliness to children, 3) domiciled in Jabodetabek (the area consideration is important because researcher must conduct in-depth interviews). In recruiting informants, researchers conducted snowballing technique. Prior to the interview, the place of the interview is determined based on mutual agreement. Some informants were interviewed at their office because the interview was carried out at office hour. To date, there are five informants who have been interviewed.
This research use two goodness criteria applicable to qualitative research: credibility, and comfortability (15). The weakness of this research is that, this study only focus on urban context. Additionally, researchers did not conduct an observational method.

Findings
It is found that there are some factors that shaped human behavior in keeping a clean environment. Those factors are, 1) role of mothers, 2) social context, and 3) child's capacity in coping this issues as it is shown below: Based on the interviews conducted, the researcher found some results as follows: 1. Environmental issues are not a major issue in socialization but this is considered important. Mrs. A: I habitually don't talk about environments, but at least she knows to throw garbage in its place. The following table shown below will summarize those data from all of the informants for some key concepts.

Conclusion
Based on the field data, related to the research objectives, this can be concluded that:  Environmental issue is not primary issue, but it is still considered important for mothers in carrying out their role to conduct socialization and education in environmental issues  In obtaining knowledge about environmental issues, mothers use various media such as social media, the internet, online media, TV, magazines and newspapers and through direct interaction with women/neighbors and people in the workplace.  To provide knowledge and socialization to children, the mothers teach by giving direct examples.  To explain specific activities that can provide knowledge for children about how to maintain environmental cleanliness is to involve children to take a walk/do camping to a clean place, so that children can feel the direct benefit of maintaining environmental cleanliness activities, watch TV that broadcast environment issues, invite the children to discuss about the environmental issues.