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Brian Lehrer: Brain Lehrer on WNYC, climate anxiety is rising among America's children. For parents, it can be hard to manage all of the emotions and questions that are arising now when kids start to get it about climate change, and experience eco-anxiety. The reality is that the climate crisis is going to impact today's children more than it did previous generations, according to National Geographic, for example, "To meet the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement to stave off the most catastrophic consequences of climate change, the average child born today must emit about eight times less carbon dioxide than their grandparents".

Kids, how are you going to do that? No wonder you have climate anxiety. Joining me now to talk about how to help kids deal with their climate anxiety and empower them along the way is Mary DeMocker, author of the book The Parents' Guide to Climate Revolution: 100 Ways to Build a Fossil-Free Future, Raise Empowered Kids, and Still Get a Good Night's Sleep. That's a great book title, Mary, welcome to WNYC.

Mary DeMocker: Thank you so much. Glad to be here.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, any parents out there who are experiencing their child's eco-anxiety and want to describe it, tell us what you're doing about it or ask Mary DeMocker a question, 646-435-7280. 646-435-7280. I'll tell everybody that your book first came out in 2018. Do you think that the last year during lockdown and other things pertaining to the pandemic has impacted the way the kids are experiencing climate anxiety?

Mary DeMocker: Sure. I know for us, we had the most incredible wildfires here in Oregon that we never experienced. That ratcheted up everybody's anxiety in my own community because we were actually locked down for almost two weeks with the world's worst terror. In other places, kids are on screens. They're learning more about what's happening. 2020 was one of the hardest years on record and people are noticing this, they're watching and they're learning about what the dangers are, especially as more of these reports come out that say we have just a few years to turn things around.

I think kids are inhaling a lot more information over the last year online, and that can be really scary because they're often alone when they're looking at their phone or their computer, and it can feel pretty heavy to be told that your future is looking really bleak. Not only that politicians and adults often aren't really taking it as seriously as they need to, and that can be really concerning for anybody of any age.

Brian Lehrer: You tell this really awful story, at least it starts out awful. You can tell me how it ends. In your book of one of your nephews when he was only four years old, telling his mom, "I don't want to be alive anymore, and the Earth will die. I don't want to be here when everything's dead." Mary, yikes. What's the first step if you have a young kid who's just suddenly very afraid of what's happening to the planet and comes out with things like that?

Mary DeMocker: His mom pulled him onto her lap and asked, "Tell me more", she asked him to express what he was feeling and what he was afraid of. She said it was actually a really short conversation. She just let him talk, and then she reassured him that lots of people are working very hard to make sure that the Earth is a healthy place for him to live in the future. That was all he needed, he went back to sleep immediately.

I think sometimes we can freeze up as parents and feel like, "Oh, wow, they're asking the big question and I need to tell them everything." All she did was let them know that she heard him. They were big feelings. She validated those feelings and told them that he could help out if he wanted to, and there are always people working on these issues. He shrugged and said, "Okay", and went back to sleep. That was 16 years ago.

Now, you ask, "Well, how does the story end?" The story had an ending because he's a young person out in the world, but all the way through, his parents listened to him and they help facilitate his interests and his concerns. He ended up taking a year off before college and working to help Katie Porter get elected out in California and has worked with the fundraising movement.

One of the things that he told me was he feels better when his parents are actually taking action. He's asked them to take some time off work to volunteer with grassroots organizations, and actually, work towards his future and his own kids' future. We'll see how that comes out. I don't know if they're actually taking time off work, but that's what he is requesting of them at this point.

Brian Lehrer: Alice in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Alice.

Alice: Hi, yes. I have an 18-year-old and my concern is that her anxiety, which has been unrelenting for four years, is very deep and very silent. It has everything to do with the climate crisis. We had a conversation the other day, where she said that she would absolutely never have children, she might adopt but never have her own. I believe it was in the context of the climate crisis. I'm very concerned.

She's not an activist. She doesn't express herself that way. I think that she's looking at a very dystopian world, a very dystopian vision of the world. I say that because I'm a boomer, so I'm older than most parents of kids. My world had limitless horizons, hers is completely blocked, completely hemmed in, and I don't know what to do to help her, she's not going to go out and volunteer. I can't do that kind of thing for her. I really don't know how to talk to her about it, how to reassure her that things will be okay.

Brian Lehrer: Mary, can you help Alice?

Mary DeMocker: Yes. Alice, I just feel for you and for her. I've been there in some ways, and I know parents that have been there. I really just want to acknowledge how big and finding that is for you as a parent, because we would do anything for our children and to see a child moving into a tunnel of despair like that, is very frightening. I want to acknowledge that. I also want to just express compassion for her because what she's feeling is very normal. I mean, imagine.

I'm a boomer too, I'm in my 50s but if we were told 40 years ago, that we had no future ahead, and then we watch the politicians vote over and over again to deny the climate crisis. I really get why young people are feeling this way. My own son sometimes will say things at 21 that are concerning for me, in terms of his relationships in the future.

They have valid concerns. She has valid concerns. In terms of what to do as a parent, I think it sounds like you've already been doing the most important thing, which is to listen, and to explore with her what she may be interested in doing in terms of actually taking action. I want to just, as a side note, say sometimes overwhelming anxiety is actually not something that I can prescribe something for, because it may actually be something she needs clinical help with.

Eco-anxiety has different levels, and we talked about it like it's one thing, but if she already had overwhelming anxiety, then this might just be exacerbated by climate, in which case, obviously, I'm sure you know professional help would be really a potentially a good thing for her.

In terms of how she can move forward, how you as a parent can move forward. I think an important thing would be to connect her, and maybe yourself, with other young people who are taking action. Greta Thunberg, the Swedish activist that made a big splash by telling leaders what she thought so bluntly, she was extremely depressed before she became an activist. You might enjoy her mother's memoir. I can't recall the title right now, but look up Greta's mother's memoir about what it was like living with her daughter who was actually almost hospitalized for her depression and eating disorder and how the family was just going mad trying to figure out how to help their daughter when she was only 11.

It turned out that she was going inside, more and more in despair over the climate crisis. As she got her family support, her mother stopped flying, they went vegan, things that were important to Greta. Then she started emerging. They obviously had a lot of professional help, because it was a health crisis, as well as a mental health crisis. She found that as she began to speak and as she did her strikes, even though they were scary for her at first, that's what helped her emerge. I'm not saying that that's what your daughter will necessarily want to do, but I think learning what other young people have done and what they felt might be helpful for her.

Brian Lehrer: Go ahead. Do you want her to plug up? Mention a book? Go ahead

Mary DeMocker: I want to mention a book. Jamie Margolin has written a book called Youth to Power, and it's a wonderful guidebook for young people to find out how they may want to have an impact. You say she's not an activist. I hear what you're saying, She's not going to pick up a sign necessarily and go out and do a strike like Greta did. However, there are countless ways to be part of solutions. For her, it may be that she learns about the slow fashion movement. She may be interested in regenerative farming about soil science. She may be interested in learning how to write fiction that's not dystopic. There are countless ways to push towards solutions without necessarily going out in the streets. That's actually what my book is full of. It's full of ideas for how you can do that as a family.

Brian Lehrer: I think Greta Thunberg's mom's book is called Scenes from the Heart, right? Just for that book title. I will double-check that. That's what I thought I saw online, but I'll double-check that if you don't.

Mary DeMocker: If Your House is on Fire, it may be something like that.

Brian Lehrer: Our House is on Fire. I think these may be two different nationality versions of the same book, but yes, Our House is on Fire, Scenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisis. Let's get one more in here and it's going to come from an opposite perspective, I think. Theo in Prospect Heights. Alice, by the way, I hope that was helpful, what Mary was able to give you on that for your 18-year-old. Theo in Prospect Heights, you're on WNYC. Hi.

Theo: Hi Brian. Hi, Mary. I wanted to give a little bit of a different perspective and I think a lot of the problem with children and anxiety is that we're teaching them this stuff at way too young in age. I feel like a lot of kids, when they grow up, may suffer heart disease or cancer, and we don't start putting that on them at like three or four.

Brian Lehrer: That's interesting. Mary, I will point out to our listeners that you write in your book, "Half of us kids absorb climate science that's hit or miss at best, and often wildly inaccurate." Theo told our screener, he's got a two-year-old who he took out of daycare if they got that right because it was too intense on some of these points even at that age. Theo, did I get that right?

Theo: Yes. He's no longer two, but we took him out of preschool because they were just very heavy-handed with a lot of the climate stuff and other. It was like right after Trump was elected and I'm all for climate justice and social justice and all that stuff, but I think to lay that on the shoulders of such young children, you're responsible.

Brian Lehrer: Maybe you're going to say it depends how it's done, but Mary DeMocker, what about that?

Mary DeMocker: Well, I would agree with you, Theo, I think that sounds like a good decision for your family. I didn't use the words climate change when my kids were little, I definitely sheltered them from all kinds of bad news, whether it was someone getting stabbed on our streets when they were little. I didn't tell them about that until about 10 years ago, they don't need to know. We don't need to burden, and we shouldn't burden children with these huge overwhelming comms concepts and with the problems that adults need to solve and protect them from.

In terms of introducing the climate to young kids, I basically don't, I introduced concepts about cultivating love in them, with concepts of protecting our earth, protecting our water, caring for the health of our own bodies and the caring for our communities. We talked about bringing soup to the neighbors when they're sick, we talk about making sure grandma is comfortable when she comes to visit. We talk about how to, we rescued worms from puddles. We've spent a lot of time outdoors connecting with the earth.

That's how I talked about climate when they were little. Then we showed them what love and care looks like. For us that meant we composted food waste, we did a lot of the at-home things that you can do, and we left campsites cleaner than we found them. But more importantly, I think was that they saw me in particular, both my husband and I. They saw us going to climate marches. I was actually leading them when they were little. I wasn't asking them to learn the climate science or even to necessarily come to these if they didn't want to when they were old enough not to, but I modeled what it looks like to be a good steward of the planet of the community and of our family.

That really means demanding. The representatives make laws that protect people and the planet. We just made civics a natural part of the stewardship of our communities. My kids, when they were little, besides voting, we would get together with our neighbors. We made it fun. We would have a beer and talk about which city council person we want them to vote for.

Brian Lehrer: We have to leave it there because we're out of time. Great role modeling to end with from Mary DeMocker, author of The Parents' Guide to Climate Revolution. 100 Ways to Build a Fossil-Free Future, Raise Empowered Kids, and Still Get a Good Night's Sleep. Thank you so much.

Mary DeMocker: Thanks for having me, Brian.

 

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