Talking to Children about Climate Change

There has been a steep rise in the number of assemblies and form time presentations focusing on the issue of climate change. Unless we change course soon, approximately 75% of all assembly time will have been taken away by 2030, caused entirely by man-made climate change school resource packs.

It has broken free from Geography and Science lessons, and now all manner of classrooms, from PSHE and RE, to Maths and English, are talking about it. But it feels to me like we haven’t worked out how to tell this particular story. We haven’t figured out the language yet, the tone, the narrative arc. And it’s really important we work this out sooner rather than later.

My son, who has just turned four, knows that the Earth is sick. He knows this because he recently got out from the library ‘Hello, Mr World’, in which our planet is weirdly personified as a patient being examined by two young children pretending to be doctors. It’s a cute conceit, if you ignore the fact that it leads to a slightly odd final act in which the children appear to be blaming the planet for its poor condition, insisting somewhat unhelpfully that it changes its ways before it’s too late.

Harsh

But it’s the ‘ending’ that always bothers me. Masses of children run out of the page to happily declare “we are the future, Mr World, and we will look after you.” These stories, like all the school talks, form-time discussions and assemblies I’ve seen of late, always seem to end prematurely. They seem to run out of time before the ‘and now here’s what we need to do’ section. Any meaningful actions we can take to combat climate change, much like in Hello, Mr World, take the form of a ‘prologue’, a footnote, once people (my kids, anyway) have largely stopped paying attention.

And in my opinion the recommendations (when they do come) tend to be somewhat unambitious. Turn off taps when you’re not using them. Switch off lights. Now I’m not expecting these stories to end with an exhortation for children to divest their Junior ISAs from companies involved in fossil fuel extraction. But my fear is that these small, personal steps might lull us into thinking that’s all we need to do too. Whereas the truth is, these actions are not the ones we need to be focusing on if we are serious about limiting temperature rises to 1.5 degrees by the end of the century. The key changes we have to make have little to do with switching off lights, or taps, or even recycling. Studies show that cutting down on air travel, adopting a plant-based diet, switching energy suppliers, going car free, will all have an exponentially greater impact. Being honest with our children about the necessary steps we will have to make is, I feel, an important part of being honest with ourselves.

But frankly it can all start to feel like an abdication of responsibility from our generation to the next in any case. Too many assemblies appear to be pedalling the idea that this is something people of my generation are no longer able to help with, and that it will be up to today's youth to find the answers that have so far eluded us. This rather conveniently exempts us from making all the difficult choices that they are going to have to make. It is as if we are saying 'we are doing our bit by educating you, now go off and find a solution'. Go on strike. Post something about it on Tik Tok, whatever. Just be quiet while I book my holiday. Greta, in this regard, is a tremendous source of comfort for the guilt-ridden Gen Xer. It is as if someone is finally doing what we have been telling children to do for years, take a serious stand against climate change, so that we don’t have to.

Jill Pelto uses actual climate change data to create her artworks

What's more, someone does need to be looking at the psychological impact that our projections of apocalypse and extinction are having on young people, not out of a desire to protect them, necessarily, but out of a desire to ensure that the message doesn’t fall dead on arrival. This is an enormous amount to take on board, a pervading sense of doom, our own weighty fears and anxieties dumped on fragile and developing minds that have only just started to process what’s going on. The planet is dying. Huge swathes of the planet will become uninhabitable before long, species that they are only just starting to fall in love with will soon become extinct. These are potentially traumatic events that they are having to navigate. They are going to need some way of processing this trauma usefully, in such a way that it can turn into meaningful action. Otherwise they will find their own ways of dealing with it, and we know what form these will take.

Subject someone to images of trauma or high stress and their bodies release enough cortisol to trigger the fight, flight or freeze response. It's a highly effective mechanism for self-preservation carried over in our DNA from times when we would routinely face immediate existential threats like sabre-toothed tigers or poisonous snakes. Today, in this case, the 'fight' does not manifest as a fight against climate change, but rather a fight against (or flight from) the climate change message itself. Denial, in other words. A hostile repudiation of the messenger. Shifting responsibility onto others. Or they might freeze. Paralysed by a sense of personal inadequacy compared with the scale of action required. Living in a constant state of nervous torpor, simultaneously trying to convince themselves that someone else, at some point, will have the means to deal with it.

We know they’ll do this. After all, it’s exactly what we’ve done.

'Sehnsucht, in the Midst' by Nikki Lindt

So how should we be talking to kids about climate change? A lot of organisations are keen to promote the idea of keeping it local, relevant to the child. Talking about planting trees and learning about the carbon cycle, connecting with nature rather than catastrophising on a global scale. All of which is great, and necessary. But the key for me is the tone with which we then present the message of global change.

My son is soon going to have questions about what we are doing to fix things, and at the moment I'm not sure I really have any of the right answers. We need to start properly fixing our house, explaining to children all the time how we are doing it, why we are doing it, and how they can join in. What it sometimes feels like we are doing is just repeatedly showing them videos of a collapsing house.

In one sense, it’s a form of meaning-focused coping; trying to create a positive sense of purpose, based on personal values and existential goals, out of potentially threatening and traumatic experiences. But there are other heuristics of human behaviour in play. People are much more likely to engage in an act of sacrifice or altruism if they perceive that their neighbours and peers are also doing the same thing, and that they are acting in accordance with established social norms. Also, people need to be able to visualise successful outcomes if they are going to be motivated to pursue a particularly challenging task. It pays, therefore, to highlight global success stories more than it does to scare them into inaction.

So we aren't doing nearly enough to celebrate what adults (and children) have achieved so far. And of course this shouldn't mean growing complacent or resting on our laurels, it’s simply a case of switching the narrative focus - showing children that we are in the middle of a potential success story they will want to be a part of. So let’s talk about 1989, when all 197 countries united to address the thinning of the ozone layer. Since then, 99% of the gases responsible have been eradicated, the holes in the ozone layer are ‘healing’ every year, and will have disappeared completely in the next few decades. Let’s talk about what’s happened to the use of plastic bags in the UK in the last few years, or the two Balinese schoolgirls who have orchestrated a complete ban on plastic bags in their country. Whales were hunted the point of near-extinction by the middle of the 20th Century, but following huge international co-operation on banning whale hunting, recent studies have found the whale population appears to be growing exponentially and thriving once more. Let’s talk about Greta, and what she’s achieved, but let’s show that she is not a one-off, a lone warrior, but part of a huge, established and growing movement of children and adults who have already made a significant impact in different parts of the world.

NASA images show that the hole in the ozone layer is on course to 'heal' within the next four decades

And remember, when talking to children, especially young ones, we have a huge advantage that we can exploit. My four year old doesn’t care if we holiday to New York or the New Forest. He doesn't have an addiction to animal-protein developed after years of continuous exposure. We don’t need to make it about deprivation. There’s no need to dwell on the world of cheap meat and low-cost air travel they will have to miss out on; they are so much less attached to these things than we are.

Finally, let’s make sure we instill trust in the organisations that are actually the world’s doctors. Greenpeace, the IPCC, Friends of the Earth, WWF... The scientists who have literally devoted all their adult life’s work into diagnosing the planet and finding the cures. Let’s encourage them (and by extension ourselves) to listen to these doctors, and the medicine they are proscribing.

Yes, their work yields results that we find challenging. Outcomes that suggest that we really will need to substantially change the way we live our lives. And we don’t want to hear this. We would much rather have people tell us that we don’t need to change much, that these people don’t need to be listened to. Parts of the media know this, so will pedal stories that undermine and discredit their work. People will look for gaps, flaws or inconsistencies in the expert advice and blow these up into a carnival of cynicism and denial. When the experts are telling us things we don’t want to hear, then we want to be told that we don’t need to trust the experts. Gove knew this. All politicians know this. But action at the level of the individual or community is never going to be enough - we need governments to act. And world leaders are only going to act if they sense that the public would turn against them if they didn’t.

Above all let’s create a sense of hope. Why would anyone want to climb on board a sinking ship? People are much more likely to join a project that they feel is on its way to success, rather than one they perceive as failing. It’s vital we educate children about climate change, but instead of just bombarding them with images of devastation and messages of catastrophe, let’s invite them to add their names to a growing list of people who will one day be celebrated as the heroes who saved the world.