Parenting in a Changing Climate: Tools for Cultivating Resilience, Taking Action, and Practicing Hope in the Face of Climate Change

by Elizabeth Bechard

There will be no moment within our lifetimes where we’ll arrive safely on the other side of the threat of climate change, no moment when we get to go back to life as it was. Life will not ever go back to the way it was; all of us will have to learn how to allow optimism and grief to coexist. “The next twenty years will be a period of deep uncertainty and tremendous risk, no matter what,” writes author Roy Scranton in a New York Times op-ed about climate change. “The first thing we need to do is let go of the idea that life will ever be normal again.” Even if the very best-case scenarios were to play out in the coming decades, there will be sorrow along the way. There will be losses that haunt us in the spirals of ever-gentler winters and ever-warmer summers, and losses that stab us with the acute fury of wildfires and hurricanes. There will be quieter, more intimate losses, too. For some of us—for me—there will be wanted children we choose not to bring into the world. There will be travel we choose to forgo. There will be migration, altered career plans, and the pain of watching our children learn to live with a level of uncertainty many of us never had to face in our own youth.