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December 15, 2021 - February 7, 2022
I thought often of a text from one of my Bay Area friends, describing the sense of panic at feeling unsafe in her own home amidst the wildfires. She posed a question that was simultaneously rhetorical and literal: where can we go to be safe?
Three years ago, I became increasingly worried about climate change.
Waking up to climate change as the parent of young children had a particular slant of cruelty to it: knowing that I needed to do something about climate change during a season of life where I already felt stretched beyond my capacity on a daily basis felt like an impossibly heavy burden to carry. What could I possibly do? If I did know what to do, when would I find the time to do it? And then, would it even make a difference? Would it ever be enough?
The Solutions Project, an organization that supports grassroots climate solutions, the vast majority of funding for environmental causes—up to 95%—goes to organizations led by white people (and 70 to 80% goes to organizations led by white men). I’m writing this book to speak directly to readers who, like me, have privileges and resources that can be leveraged in allyship with parents who have been systematically denied access to the same privileges and resources, parents whose families will likely be far more impacted by climate change than ours. It’s my intention to reflect on my social
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I am of the firm belief that every child who is here belongs and deserves a safe, livable planet.
climate change is a problem that needs their attention, but can’t yet fathom how to make room for one more thing in the mayhem of their everyday family lives.
Helping people navigate conflicting values and desires is central to the work of a coach,
In the Global North, one child was clearly the most eco-friendly approach to parenthood, if you looked at it purely from a carbon footprint perspective. But few people look at something as intimate and personally consequential as the decision to become a parent purely from a carbon footprint perspective.
It was far from the first terrifying climate headline I’d read, but the framing of the article had the effect of planting a ticking time bomb in my psyche. Twelve years is less than the length of a childhood.
It was inspiring to be in community with others in these trainings. But for me, learning was also a well-practiced escape route from pain and anxiety. If I could armor myself with enough knowledge about a subject,
Often, what I was learning on the science front left me feeling more paralyzed and grief-stricken than motivated.
Even the most conservative estimates projected that by 2050, the climate in North Carolina would feel far more like the climate of northern Mexico than the North Carolina of my youth. I did not want to live in the climate of northern Mexico—I wanted crisp autumns, distinct springs. I
I’d been underwater for the first two years of parenthood, the time a blur of trying to juggle work with endless diapers, feeding schedules, and very little sleep. As soon as I was able to start coming up for air, the world itself seemed to be drowning.
How could I bear to teach my children to fall in love with a world that would inevitably break their hearts? And how could I bear to look them in the eyes in twenty years—even ten years—if I didn’t do more to preserve a livable planet when there was still time?
I grieved the state of the natural world. It had broken me to realize that climate change would be the defining backdrop of my experience as a parent, even as I understood how privileged I was to have ever assumed that the world would be a safe, stable place for my white, North American children.
As parents, we know something about how to love what is disappearing. We know how to love what is disappearing with our whole hearts, even as they break. Climate science is clear: the world as we grew to love it in our own childhoods is irreversibly changing.
activist Valarie Kaur’s words, spoken nearly four years earlier in the grief-filled wake of the 2016 U.S. election: “The future is dark. But what if—what if this darkness is not the darkness of the tomb but the darkness of the womb? What if our America is not dead but a country that is waiting to be born?”
Climate change will shape the experience of parenthood for all of us moving forward; anxiety and grief will inevitably be our companions as we watch the world we knew change form. But climate change also offers us the opportunity to become something new, both individually and collectively: if we are willing to accept our responsibility to take climate action on behalf of our children, even as our hands shake and our hearts are breaking, something new will be born.
Nothing shatters our assumptions about the world or ourselves like the arrival of a tiny, screaming bundle of flesh and bones that we’re assigned to love for the rest of our lives.
I just numb out because it’s too much to process. I care, but I often feel too overwhelmed to actually act.” Several respondents expressed that parenting itself made acting difficult: “I feel super-caught in knowing this requires action, and feeling so overwhelmed by the day-to-day requirements of parenting small children. I hate that I’m not ‘doing more,’ but I’m also aware of how maxed out I am.”
And one mother wrote: “Sometimes, I regret having children because of how uncertain their future is, even though I love them intensely. It’s heartbreaking no matter which way I think about it. I hate knowing their lives will be burdened by a damaged planet. And I hate that it feels like there isn’t much I can do about it.”
I, too, felt utterly overwhelmed by what parenting two small humans required of me on a daily basis and how hard this made it to live into my own environmental values. One respondent had written: “I have found that I have made a lot more compromises in terms of my environmental impact as a parent than I ever thought I would. I’ve used disposable diapers. I’ve driven my kids around to get more sleep. I’ve purchased cheap plastic party favors and bought cheap processed food. This is due to exhaustion and general lack of support. Time and time again, I’ve chosen convenience in order to preserve
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Parents of small children, especially mothers, are constantly bombarded with messages that we’re not doing enough.
while we might have a magnet on our fridge reminding us that “comparison is the thief of joy,” it’s profoundly difficult to counter the effects of living in a culture that constantly tells mothers that they need to do and be more. Embracing a sense of “enoughness” as a parent requires heroic levels of resilience and inner confidence. Therein lies a second paradox for parents: we become aware that we really might not be doing enough to make the world a safe place for our children in the very same season of life that we’re desperately trying to claim a sense of enoughness.
We’re trying to figure out how to hold a complicated truth. We are enough, but we also need to do more.
I felt a sense of urgency to act. At the same time, I felt so overwhelmed by what motherhood required of me on a daily basis that any intimation that I should be doing more was paralyzing. How could it be right that I was mothering two babies, working full-time, desperately trying to maintain my marriage, friendships, and some semblance of personal well-being, and still not doing enough?
And yet, how could I face my children if I just stood by as the planet their future depended on was being destroyed, assuming that someone else would do the work of protecting it? How could I expect them to learn to stand up for their values in moments of moral consequence if I wasn’t willing to do the same thing myself?
Underneath any measure of grief, fear, anxiety, or sadness is the truth that something we love and care deeply about is at stake. It’s an extraordinary loss to lose access to our own capacity for love.
Parenting in a changing climate requires exactly this: that we embrace the messiness and complexity of the situation we’re in, and that we walk through uncharted territory with open hearts. Those of us raising young children in the coming decade will be doing so in a climate that is both literally and figuratively different than the parenting climate of any previous generation. The years that we’ll be watching our children learn to walk, talk, read, and ride bicycles are the same years that climate scientists tell us we have an urgent mandate to stop carbon emissions and preserve what
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Sleep cost $39.99 plus two-day shipping that night.
When we’re tasked with keeping these precious little bodies safe, the world can feel like a more dangerous place, and we adjust our behaviors accordingly. Social psychology research suggests that parents whose parental role is “salient”—or more central to their identity—perceive greater risk, make more risk-averse choices, and trust strangers less than non-parents or parents whose role is less salient. “A risk-vigilant mindset,” say researchers Richard Eibach and Steven Mock, “may be an important psychological adaptation to the parental role.” Children need parents who can protect them, and
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Psychologist Daniel Gilbert uses the acronym PAIN to summarize the four key triggers that cue us to respond to a threat: we respond when risks feel Personal (they impact something of personal importance); Abrupt (we are most attuned to sudden changes, and far less attuned to slow-moving threats); Immoral (we respond to threats that seem repulsive, immoral, or indecent); and to risks that threaten us Now. Threats that trigger our PAIN points have salience, demanding our attention and action.
But according to researcher Per Espen Stoknes, disaster framing isn’t effective at motivating us to take action. Instead of provoking a clear, engaged response to the problem of climate change, it tends to provoke cognitive dissonance and denial.
“After thirty years of scary climate change communications,” Stoknes says in his 2017 TED talk, “more than 80% of media articles still use disaster framings, but people habituate to and then desensitize to doom overuse. So many of us are now suffering a kind of apocalypse fatigue, getting numb from too much collapse porn.”
A moderate majority (60%) of the alarmed segment could name at least one health risk associated with global warming, but they were the only group in which a majority did so. The vast majority of respondents overall could not accurately name any health problems associated with global warming.
Forty-six percent of all students met criteria for one or more probable diagnoses of PTSD, depression, anxiety, or substance abuse, with students who had experienced greater impact from the fire exhibiting higher scores on all mental health measures.
Eighty-seven percent of children who had experienced high impact from the storm—such as having a window or door broken open, a roof caved in or blown off, or an injured pet—reported symptoms of post-traumatic stress in the months after the hurricane. Be it a storm or a wildfire, the intensity of exposure to a natural disaster is directly correlated to the level of adverse mental health impacts experienced afterwards.
globally, children will bear the vast majority—close to 90%—of the burden of disease.
In 2019, Australian eco-philosopher Glenn Albrecht published a book called Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World. Drawing on his own lived experience as well as on older Australian Aboriginal ways of knowing, Albrecht explores a precise vocabulary for humans’ emotional responses to the extraordinary scale and speed of ecological and environmental change.
Topoaversion: the feeling that you do not wish to return to a place that you once loved and enjoyed when you know that it has been irrevocably changed for the worse.
And solastalgia, he says, is the word for a specific flavor of distress caused by environmental change. It was solastalgia I felt when I learned that by 2050, the climate of North Carolina is likely to feel like the climate of Northern Mexico, no matter what actions are taken. Solastalgia is the feeling of realizing that the version of home you know and love is slipping away in a slow-motion train wreck, and there’s nothing you can do about it. It’s the feeling of knowing that once gone, that version of home is never coming back. “It’s the homesickness you have,” writes Albrecht, “when you are
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Rather than being validated, many of us who have experienced emotional responses to trauma in the natural world have had those responses pathologized. We’ve been told we’re oversensitive, assured that things really aren’t as bad as we’re making them out to be. We’ve been gaslit and told that we’re the ones with a problem, when really, the problem is that the rest of the world has gone numb.
This represents a dramatic generational shift in attitudes towards family building. As recently as 2013, a Gallup survey found that 95% of Americans either had kids, desired and planned to have kids, or wished that they had.
research study we’d done at my workplace on expressive writing for parents’ resilience in the context of COVID-19.
Several years back, our small team had run a pilot trial on expressive writing for trauma resilience that was both extremely well-received by participants and showed promising results. In the interim, I had trained with our colleague John Evans, a leader in the field of expressive writing and narrative medicine, to become an expressive writing facilitator myself.
evidence-based practices from positive psychology that could easily be adapted to the form of expressive writing, such as expressing gratitude and savoring positive moments. The writing prompts for the parenting study were similar, but condensed into a four-week intervention with shorter writing sessions each time to accommodate parents’ more hectic, COVID-demolished lives.
growing body of research on expressive writing suggests: that when we face untenable circumstances, putting our emotions into words can help us cope.
Both crises ask us to make individual changes and sacrifice for the sake of collective well-being: COVID-19 begs us to act on behalf of our elders; climate change begs us to act on behalf of our children. And both force us to sit with an uncomfortable question: will we? Will we make individual sacrifices for the collective well-being? Will we act on behalf of those who are more vulnerable than we are, even when the threat still seems invisible? And will we act in time?
Haelle writes: “Research on disaster and trauma focuses primarily on what’s helpful for people during the recovery period, but we’re not close to recovery yet. People can use their surge capacity for acute periods, but when dire circumstances drag on, Masten says, ‘you have to adopt a different style of coping.’”
In Upside: The New Science of Post-Traumatic Growth, journalist Jim Rendon devotes an entire chapter to the exploration of expressive writing and post-traumatic growth. Expressive writing, he says, is a form of deliberate rumination. Unlike the variety of rumination in which you’re still awake in the wee hours of the morning worrying about the fact that your husband left the oven on—that’s intrusive rumination, according to psychology researchers—deliberate rumination involves consciously reexamining and reflecting on a difficult event or circumstance as a way of intentionally processing it.
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