Lord, if anyone missed this wonderful article by Ellen Gamerman on pint-sized environmental advocates driving their parents crazy, click on through to see perhaps the definitive counterargument to that whole spare-the-rod school of thought. Here are a couple bites:

Nicole Thomas thought her 4-year-old son’s interest in the environment was cute — until he told her she needed to quit drinking coffee. Ailer said he’s worried that coffee growers in Central America are cutting down forests to grow their crops. “Going to a coffee shop with a kid who’s saying, ‘Mommy, you can’t have a cup of coffee’ isn’t very pleasurable,” says the 35-year-old mom from Boulder, Colo.

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Benjamin Adelson, a first grader at Poughkeepsie Day School in New York, started asking his parents to conserve more energy after he watched a presentation about recycling performed by third and fourth graders. The 7-year-old recently decided he should try to help the cause by turning off his night-light. But when his older sister, Rowan, unplugged it at bedtime, he was soon screaming, “Help!” from his bunk bed. “I’m scared of the dark, so it’s a real problem,” says Benjamin. His father, Jay Adelson, founder of the social Web site Digg.com, says Benjamin’s conservation concerns border on the obsessive: “He sees the cutting down of a tree as a sacrilegious and awful event.”

The piece includes a handy sidebar, “How to Manage Your Activist Kid.”