IT'S quite a challenge to list the skills, attitudes, beliefs and habits that we want our children to adopt. It would include all the sensible ways of behaving, and we assume that they'll be sufficient and be relevant to their lives, but we run the risk of being permanently out of date, and leaving them unprepared for a very different future.

It's a real struggle once you have got past 'say thank you', 'don't hit your sister', 'yes, you are going to church or the mosque', 'don't tell lies', ' keep your bedroom tidy', 'take the dog for a walk', 'have you done your homework', 'be punctual', 'don't drop litter' and 'it's your turn to do the washing up'.

Inevitably they'll pick up any religious and political beliefs from parents, despite a possible teen rebellion, and the same goes for attitudes to people from other countries, their taste in food and exercise, the daily newspaper choice and alcohol use.

Schools are the other main influence and disappointingly there's little difference between the syllabuses I encountered seventy years ago and modern ones. There's inevitably a bit more history, but poetry, foreign languages, maths, science and practical and artistic skills haven't changed drastically, despite different classroom technology and the use of computers for both information and presentation.

The problem is that we ignorant and self indulgent parents have ensured that it's today's children, and theirs, who will suffer most from our adult abuse of the climate caused by poor energy efficiency, excessive flying, the use of standby, sparse public transport, over heated homes, out of season imported food, excessively powered cars, unnecessary driving, lackadaisical recycling, the indulgent use of powered garden tools and too many clothes.

What a legacy! We haven't prepared our children for future changes and, as it's essential that it happens, it's now up to the schools. So by the time they leave primary school every child should know about CO2, how much they produce, what effect it has, and how to reduce it.

So each year at least one term would use CO2 as the background for all the lessons, with the children using their own experiences to work out how much CO2 they generate. The content would be very wide, involving how their bedrooms are lit, how they travel to school, where their food comes from, how waste is dealt with, how electricity is produced, what their clothes are made from, how much energy computers use, where they intend to go on holiday and what food they could grow in their own gardens and so on.

It won't be comfortable for the guilty teachers, but then neither is flooding or a temperature over 40 degrees.