Parenting and climate change

By CASEY BEEBE Gazette Contributing Writer

Published in print: Saturday, February 1, 2014

EM_parenting and climate change

I have a dream of children who think all electricity comes from the sun, of children who are just used to composting toilets. I see hordes of children who know exactly where their food comes from, I imagine children who don’t know what a plastic grocery bag was.

I saw how this vision could be possible when this summer I witnessed my 2-year-old son enthralled with the solar panels being installed on our roof and especially with the “solar electricians” who were installing them. He didn’t know what electricity was, or what an electrician was, but now if we talk about electricity he reminds us that it comes from the sun. If we mention an electrician he corrects us that it is a solar electrician. In his 2-year-old mind that is how we get electricity; that is his default.

Why not choose this vision for the future? The alternative is grim — what better choice do we have than to hope for this? Unfortunately, we cannot protect our children from the problems that are here and coming with climate change. As Oberlin College Professor David Orr recently put it in a speech to the New England Environmental Education Alliance , “We have to equip [children] with the stamina to witness ecological losses and collateral societal damages without being immobilized by despair. They will need our help to form a stronger and deeper attachment to life and a more authentic hope that lies on the farther horizon. The rising generation must have the capacity to think in systems and patterns …. We must enable them, in other words, to think clearly and deeply about the proper role of humankind on Earth over the long haul. We have every reason to re-examine our beliefs, worldviews, institutions, cultural foundations, and manner of living—and get down to work.”

At the Hitchcock Center for the Environment in Amherst, we are thinking and talking about how to help children navigate climate change. How do we make sure they are informed at developmentally appropriate stages and empowered to make sound decisions? How do we do that without terrifying them or making them feel helpless even if that may be how we feel? We have begun holding discussion groups about parenting and climate change to address these questions.

We’ve started these conversations with a few tips and pointers for parents:

We don’t need to totally understand climate change in order to talk about it. For instance, the National Network for Ocean and Climate Change Interpretation offers the simple metaphor of a blanket:: Climate change is caused, in part, by a human-made blanket of carbon dioxide that is building up around the Earth and trapping in heat. This heat-trapping blanket is thickened by burning large quantities of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas. By burning these fossil fuels, we release carbon dioxide into the air where it builds up and traps heat that would otherwise escape. This blanket effect leads to the warming of the planet, and the atmospheric balance that keeps the climate stable is disrupted.
We may think we’re keeping this issue from our children until they’re ready, but chances are they have heard snippets and may be confused or scared — even if we think they’ve been “sheltered.” Find out what they’ve heard in order to explain and provide reassurance.
Children need to have a sense of safety and security; this is essential to a sense of empowerment. So when we talk about climate change, and when they hear scary things, it’s important for us to be reassuring. Rather than saying there isn’t a problem, we need to tell them that a lot of adults are working very hard to solve this problem, and discuss what we can do to help.
When climate change comes up with children,
We get them outside to play, watch a spider building a web together;
We teach composting and compassion and responsibility for our actions;
We wonder and question, we inquire, we help develop critical minds;
We get active and do something as a family, not because it will have some huge impact on climate change but because it may have a huge impact on children by empowering them and teaching them to roll up their sleeves and dig in;
We let them dream — new thinking will come from “pipe dreams” and thinking outside the box; and
We turn things into teaching moments; we don’t just ask your child to turn out the lights or close the refrigerator door, instead we ask them to do those things in order to not be wasteful with electricity.
Take care of yourself, find your own reserves of hope, for children will sense and echo our hopelessness.

Our children are the next generation of problem solvers. We need to empower them to believe these problems are solvable. Let’s help them have hope and bolster them with deep connections to nature, each other and our communities, so they become adults whose default is to think big-picture and long-term, who automatically think about the interdependence of their choices and actions. They will have a new paradigm, one that respects limits and all life on earth.

Casey Beebe is an environmental educator and community programs coordinator at the Hitchcock Center for the Environment.

Earth Matters, written by staff and associates of the Hitchcock Center for the Environment at 525 South Pleasant St., Amherst, appears every other week. For more information, call 413-256-6006, or write to us.