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

by Elizabeth Bechard

You can spend fifteen to twenty minutes (or longer) responding to each prompt, but research has shown that even two minutes of expressive writing can have therapeutic benefit. These prompts can meet you where you are. In condensed form, the prompts flow as follows: Prompt 1: Write about your deepest feelings about a difficult or traumatic event. Prompt 2: Keep writing about your feelings. Go deeper. Let it all out. Prompt 3: Now, consider the circumstances from a different perspective—write about this. Prompt 4: Finally, given everything you’ve written, write a cohesive narrative about what happened to take forward.

All of our messy emotions are still with us, and the painful circumstances may not have changed at all, but in writing about them, we’ve created a sense of spaciousness that might not have been there before.

Research also suggests that writing about challenging experiences in an organized, deliberate manner—such as by responding to specific writing prompts—is more helpful than doing so in a disorganized way, such as writing haphazardly in a journal.

In a study of 380 pairs of mothers and babies in New York, where Sandy made landfall on October 29th, doctoral candidate Jessica Buthmann and Professor Yoko Nomura found that babies whose families experienced higher levels of disaster-related stress (such as loss of electricity or phone service) experienced more negative emotions at six months of age than babies exposed to less stress. Babies whose families had gone longer without support during the crises—such as restored electricity, restored phone service, and financial support—expressed more distress,

Crisis resilience requires, as psychologist Ann Masten explained, access to our “surge capacity”: the adrenaline-fueled ability to get things done in an emergency situation.

Child psychologists encourage parents to help their children navigate disaster situations with messages that communicate physical and emotional safety, connection, and resourcefulness: This is scary, but we’re doing everything we can to prepare so that we stay safe. Your feelings are valid. I’m here for you and willing to listen if you need to talk. We’ll get through this together. We are connected. We will adapt and find creative solutions for whatever challenges may come. Children build resilience when they are reminded that their relationship with their caregivers is loving and secure. They build resilience when they know their parents are listening.

Early research on sensory processing issues suggests that babies born prematurely are at higher risk, and climate change research suggests that rising temperatures will trigger higher rates of premature birth. It would be a harrowing double-whammy to have a child with sensory processing issues and not be able to take them outside because of smoke, heat, or storms. It would be harrowing, as a parent, not to be able to take any child outside.

Our Climate Voices, a youth-led organization that aims to “humanize the climate disaster through storytelling” in storytelling and listening workshops that intentionally center the voices of those most impacted by climate change.

Storytelling is also a way of shaping and changing culture. In an essay called “Harnessing Cultural Power” in All We Can Save, artist and social justice organizer Favianna Rodriguez calls readers to embrace diverse, creative storytelling as an avenue for social and environmental change: “The power of culture lies in the power of story,” Rodriguez writes. “Stories change and activate people, and people have the power to change norms, cultural practices, and systems. Stories are like individual stars… When many stars coalesce around similar themes, they form a narrative constellation that can disrupt business as usual. They reveal patterns and help illuminate that which was once obscured. The powerful shine in one story can inspire other stories. We need more transformational stories so that we can connect the dots and shift narratives.”

A critical first step of choosing life, Macy says, is choosing our story. In workshops for The Work That Reconnects, one of the guiding principles is the idea that there are three primary stories of our time: Business as Usual, The Great Unraveling, and The Great Turning. Each of these stories offers a lens through which to see the world and current events, and in the sense that each of these stories is presently being told by fiercely devoted storytellers, they are all true. The story of Business as Usual, Macy says, “is the story of the Industrial Growth Society. We hear it from politicians, business schools, corporations, and corporate-controlled media. Here the defining assumption is that there is little need to change the way we live.” Everything is fine. No need to worry about economic or environmental disruption; they’re just temporary difficulties. We’ll recover, we’ll profit, and everything will be back to normal soon.

The story of The Great Unraveling offers a different perspective. This, Macy tells us, “is the story we tend to hear from environmental scientists, independent journalists, and activists. It draws attention to the disasters that Business as Usual has caused and continues to create.” The Great Unraveling is backed by data, by terrifying reports about climate change, and by the accumulating evidence of catastrophe wrought by extreme weather events and other forms of ecological destruction. Nothing is fine, this story goes, and here’s the evidence to prove it. We’re running out of time, and things are only going to get worse. We’re fucked.

The third story, The Great Turning, “is the story we hear from those who see the Great Unraveling and don’t want it to have the last word. It involves the emergence of new and creative human responses that enable the transition from the Industrial Growth Society to a Life-Sustaining Society. The central plot is about joining together to act for the sake of life on Earth.” Things are not fine, but the story isn’t over yet. We can and will find creative solutions...

I’m so glad you reached out to get the support that you deserve,

This is a story that honors what is painful while also honoring what is possible.

But there are common through lines in the resilience practices that, I’ve found, help the most. Three of these through lines are emotional expression, connection, and conscious storytelling.

But this doesn’t have to be the last word: if we can stay deeply present with pain, both ours and our children’s, we can find our way together into stories of great turning, and from these stories, a universe of possibility emerges. From these

What practices help you cultivate resilience during difficult times? Which relationships help you feel resilient?

Most coaching relationships start with some version of a visioning exercise, where the coach asks the client to imagine the future or a specific desired outcome in vibrant detail: What do you really want? If you could create exactly the future you want for yourself, what would that future look like? Who would be there with you? What would an ordinary day feel like? What sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and experiences would be part of this future? What makes this vision matter to you?

Some clients need the support of the word permission to relax more fully into a visioning exercise: If I gave you full permission to dream of the future you most deeply desire, and permission to let go of all of the reasons you think that future can’t happen for just the next few minutes… what might that future look like?

Students learn about climate change, but not without the emotional support to process what they’re learning in a way that builds resilience.

Parents have far more support on the emotional resilience front, too. As natural disasters come and sea levels rise as scientists predicted they would, climate anxiety and grief are as common and widely acknowledged as postpartum depression.

There’s been a collective movement to embrace “low-carbon happiness.” We buy less. Far, far less than we used to. Recognizing that capitalism and a consumerist culture lie at the root of climate change and environmental destruction, people have slowly begun to shift away from the gluttonous levels of shopping that had been the norm for the first two decades of the 21st century.

Less air travel and jet-setting mean more time to explore local adventures, and deeper relationships with place. Less hustle to earn money to buy things we don’t really need means more time to connect with the people we love. Our homes, and our hearts, are more spacious.

Ray describes measuring her success as an educator by her students’ ability to “see more problems in the world.” She had assumed, as most environmental messaging does, that giving her students information about the problems of the world and a critical academic lens through which to analyze them would lead to action. But without the emotional resilience to withstand and metabolize what they had learned about climate change and the state of the world, the students were too traumatized to imagine anything other than a continuation of the story of great unraveling.

Restorative, regenerative self-care practices are not an optional luxury; they are essential for resilience and long-term success. If we do not care wisely for our muscle of imagination, we will not be able to use it to craft the future our children and grandchildren deserve. So when despair, anxiety, or a sense of numbness make it difficult to envision thriving in a climate-changed future, the wisest approach may be a counterintuitive one: take a break from trying to dream about what’s to come and refuel by reconnecting with who and what you love in the present. Hug someone you adore. Move your body in a nourishing way. Bake your grandmother’s gingerbread. Watch a favorite television show. Take a walk through the forest. Come back to your imagination practice when you feel renewed.

It is too late, the most recent science tells us, to achieve the best-case scenarios for the future that were still possible a decade ago. That future is dead to us. No matter how much we may want them, we will not get future seasons that closely resemble the seasons of our childhood. The summer of 2050, when my children will be thirty-four, won’t feel like the summer of 1990, when my mom was thirty-four, or even the summer of 2017, when I was thirty-four. No amount of hoping, praying, or scientific intervention will bring those summers back—at least not during our lifetimes. This is a terrible loss, and it’s a loss that some will feel far more acutely than others. There are future memories we will never get to live. But it is not too late to imagine a future where we can thrive.

descriptive norms, which describe what we believe other people are doing, and injunctive norms, which describe what we think other people expect us to do.

Over three-quarters of parents in the intervention group completed the reading challenge, while less than half of parents in the control group did. A follow-up survey revealed that parents in the intervention group did not believe the social norm had been a motivating factor in their completion of the challenge. Parents did not believe that they had been influenced by what they were told other parents were doing, in spite of clear evidence that the social norm intervention had worked. Perceived social norms may have a greater influence on our actions than actual threat.

Yale’s data suggests that just under half of Americans perceive injunctive social norms for taking action on global warming, though this norm may not yet be very strong. Thirty percent of survey respondents indicated they believed it is “moderately” important to their friends and family that they take action to reduce global warming, while only 17% said their personal action is “very” or “extremely” important to their loved ones. An even smaller cohort of respondents perceived a descriptive norm, reporting that their friends and family make “a great deal of effort,” “a lot of effort,” or “a moderate amount of effort” to take action to reduce global warming. Just under half of us, these numbers suggest, see our family and friends responding to climate change’s metaphorical fire alarm at all. And less than 10% of us see our loved ones making a concerted effort to put out the fire.

Disaster framing tells the story of climate change as a story of great unraveling.

I often share what I call the “banana trick” with students who are struggling to talk less and give their clients room to speak. Imagine, after asking your client a single, powerful question, that you’ve taken a bite of a banana and literally cannot keep talking.

The Alliance for Climate Education advocates for a stop talking approach to climate conversations, as well. Here’s how they describe this strategy in a four-minute educational video called “The Secret to Talking About Climate Change”:

So here’s the secret to talking about climate change: listen. Listen to the other person. I know it sounds weird, but it’s the most important part. You may think the goal is to convince the other person of your perspective, but that’s going about it all wrong. The goal is just to have an actual conversation, and that only happens when people listen.”

Important parallels can be drawn between conversations about climate change and conversations about race, and many of these parallels relate to white privilege. There is privilege in avoiding conversations about difficult topics because we perceive them as primarily affecting others.

Our role in conversations with children is a little different than our role in conversations with other adults. With adults, the goal of a discussion about climate change might be to raise awareness and encourage active engagement with the issue. With our kids, we might have the same goals, but we also bear the added responsibility of nurturing their mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being. We want our children to love the natural world, rather than to fear it. Unfortunately, much of the messaging around climate change that’s currently part of school curricula across the United States is still grounded in the data-centric, disaster-framed approach that science communication experts are finally recognizing as ineffective.

The strategies we use to talk about climate change with our children must be age-appropriate and child-appropriate, tailored to our children’s temperament and developmental level. Rowanbank Arts and Education, an Edinburgh-based organization that offers arts-based environmental education for children, suggests an approach they call the “Natural Flight of Steps.” Informed by a Swedish Forest School method called Skogsmulle, which aims to help children grow closer to nature through outdoor learning, the Natural Flight of Steps sees human connection to nature as a process.

At the first step, children simply enjoy connecting with nature without any kind of learning agenda. The next step invites children to spend time observing in nature, then at the third step, caring for nature. The fourth and final step engages people—children and adults—in campaigning to care for the natural world.

Over a year after the awkward moms’ group experience, I started reading A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety. I quickly realized it was a book I wanted to talk about. After posting a casual inquiry on my Instagram account to see if anyone wanted to join me in reading it, a small, intimate book group was born. Instead

book turned into the next. These conversations weren’t medicinal just because of the sense of isolation that dissolved when we named our messy feelings out loud, but also because we started discussing strategies for cultivating resilience and participating in climate solutions. I realized that the conversations themselves were a practice for cultivating climate resilience,

What kinds of conversations do you notice about climate change in your social and professional circles? Are there places in your life where climate change might not be a comfortable topic of conversation? This chapter talks about social norms as a powerful influencer of human behavior. What social norms do you notice in terms of pro-environmental behaviors in your social and professional groups? What has been your personal experience with navigating conversations about difficult topics, like climate change and racism? Do you tend to avoid these conversations, or to lean in? How do you measure whether a conversation has gone “well”? What has been your experience with talking to your child or children about climate change? What kinds of conversations about climate change have you avoided? What has been, or might be, the cost of this?

August 2018, women represented only 18% of U.S. state governors and 23% of the mayors of the largest hundred American cities. These disparities are significantly more pronounced for women of color.

Project Drawdown defines a plant-rich diet as “the individual dietary choice: to (1) maintain a 2250 calorie per day nutritional regime; (2) meet daily protein requirements while decreasing meat consumption in favor of plant-based food items; and (3) purchase locally produced food when available.”

What’s more important to me than that my children follow a perfectly plant-based diet on their own as they get older is that they understand that what and how we eat has an impact on others. That how we consume anything has an impact on others. The way we eat isn’t truly a “personal choice,” as it’s so often treated; it’s a decision that has tangible consequences for others, even if those others are people and animals we may never meet. Making lifestyle choices with others’ well-being in mind as much as your own is a way of adapting to and parenting for the world the future needs—a world driven by collective care, by radical compassion, by an understanding of our unavoidable interdependence.

strong critique of the idea that climate solutions start at home is that the “personal responsibility narrative,” as critics call it, is a distraction from the real causes of climate change, and thus, a distraction from the work that most needs to be done to address it. A 2017 study showed that just a hundred companies are responsible for 71% of global carbon emissions, and a wealth of research—including the conclusions of Project Drawdown—agrees that no amount of personal lifestyle change will be enough to fix the problem of global warming without large-scale systemic change. In an article for Sierra, the national magazine for the Sierra Club, editor Jason Mark writes: “A larger—and more pressing—concern about the personal responsibility mantra is the way in which it obscures the culpability of fossil fuel giants and other industrial actors in fueling the crisis. To insist that individuals must make some behavioral changes only serves to let the real bad actors—the carbon barons, the banks, the right-wing ideologues who have promoted climate science denial—off the hook.

If we eat a plant-rich diet, compost, ditch single-use plastic, drive a Prius, install solar panels, trade fast fashion for used clothing, and use only LED light bulbs, this narrative tells us, we can check “did my part for the planet” off of our to-do list. The personal responsibility narrative is, in many ways, a distraction from the critical work of climate activism and political engagement. And yet. Mark continues: “…here’s the thing: when you choose to eat less meat or take the bus instead of driving or have fewer children, you are making a statement that your actions matter, that it’s not too late to avert climate catastrophe, that you have power. To take a measure of personal responsibility for climate change doesn’t have to distract from your political activism—if anything, it amplifies it.” I agree. And from a behavior change perspective, it makes sense to embrace the small steps we can take to be more climate-friendly at home. Successful long-term behavior change is the result of an accumulation of small wins that build our sense of self-efficacy over time.

Hmmm

research suggests that social norms are one of the most powerful influences on human behavior, with multiple studies showing that what our neighbors are doing has a far greater impact on adoption of environmentally-friendly behaviors than educational campaigns or even financial incentives—in short, we respond to peer pressure.

According to social scientist Damon Centola, when 25% of a population embraces an idea, social change accelerates like a catalyst has been added to a chemical reaction. The key ingredient for conversion to new ideas, Centola’s work has shown, is the strength of our social ties. In other words, having a cohesive network of friends and family who know each other makes it more likely that your personal sustainability efforts will spread “contagiously” within your social circles. Well-organized moms’ groups may be a far more potent agent for environmental and social change than many of us have realized.

Many of the highest-impact changes we can make in our households—eating a plant-rich diet, reducing food waste, reducing car and air travel, switching to green energy—will make it easier for our children to thrive in a world where these practices will need to be the norm. They’re climate mitigation strategies, but embracing them early is also a form of climate adaptation.

These are climate solutions that must start at home, within the intimate domain of our family lives. And while we mustn’t let ourselves be fooled or distracted into thinking that the “personal responsibility” level of change is enough to adequately address the problem of global warming—quite simply, it isn’t—let’s also not be fooled into discounting the actions we take at home, or dismissing the importance of the way we parent. Your actions matter more than you may think they do.

Clear says that the recipe for success in sustainable behavior change includes two key steps: (1) deciding the type of person you want to be, and (2) proving it to yourself with small wins.