Children’s Concerns about Climate Change

Transcript

Erin:
Welcome. I’m Erin Rebel, and my colleague, Karen Marie Yust, and I are talking with Yale University professor, Dr. Joyce Mercer, who’s been studying children’s spirituality for more than two decades. Her current research focuses on children and climate change.

Joyce:
Thank you.

Erin:
So can you tell us how children are expressing their climate anxiety?

Joyce:
Yeah, so in a number of ways, we’re seeing right now that children are expressing empathy and concern and care, especially around other-than-human species, extinction, or loss of habitat. So media depictions of those things often generate a lot of concern and care from children that they express, perhaps verbally, sometimes non-verbally. Sadness and grief are certainly a part of that concern. Also, we see positive motivation to do some things to make it better, that sense of wanting to be in solidarity with other creatures and with the land and with the planet, so worry for the wellbeing of others who are harmed. I know that in one church, a group of children was very concerned when they learned about a village where a flood displaced all of the residents of that area, and they saw pictures of the children having to leave their homes and a lot of concern about that and wondering what can we do to care, well to be connected with these others who are hurting because of climate change and the effects of the climate catastrophe that we are in right now.

Karen-Marie:
So why would you say, then, that this is a spiritual issue?

Joyce:
Part of why it’s a spiritual issue with children is that, like others, children are whole beings and it’s not that they’re being spiritual over here and over here it’s their physical self and over there it’s their emotional or cognitive learning self, but their wellbeing is their whole self, and so that means that when their sense of place in the world and their sense of connection to the sacred is disrupted, there is a dis-ease that happens and it may manifest itself in emotional and psychological ways or in physical ways in the case of climate migrants who are children, that sort of thing. But the climate angst, the anxiety that is getting expressed is spiritual in that we’re talking about a disruption to their experience of connection with the holy in so far as they know that through the sacredness of creation. And so that sense of being connected to God’s creative endeavors in making the planet in which we dwell is an aspect of that.

Another really important reason, though, is all the ways that community is connected to the spirituality of children, and so their sense of empathy and compassion for others gets brought into play. As I mentioned before, these are really important moral emotions that children experience at quite early ages. Some people say that empathy appears as one of the earliest moral emotions, the ability to feel with and for others. And so that is the spiritual sense of community connection, that I’m not here alone, that I belong, I am actually embedded in a wider ecology. And that too is a sense of one’s place within the larger creation that God made and loved and continues to love and called good.

The other part that I’ll bring up is just that empathy and compassion mean for Christians, of course, an extension of Jesus’ words that we are to love our neighbors, that the way that we show that we love God is through our love for neighbor, and in this case, we could think about – in such a time as this – we have to reimagine who our neighbors are to beyond the human-only community of neighbors, to understand our larger planetary neighbors, if you will, including the plants and the trees and the land that we care for and cultivate. The other creatures, the other-than-human creatures that are part of that. And how we engage neighbor includes all of those as well. And so children can really relate to that. It’s important to them. They express it in so many ways.

Erin:
What can parents and caregivers do about climate anxiety?

Joyce:
If we take your question as children’s anxiety about the climate crisis and what’s going on in massive weather events that are destructive, for example, we’ve just witnessed Hurricane Helene’s massive destruction of the southeastern part of the country and the effects of that. It’s really, really important for parents to work toward building capacities with children for holding both difficult and welcome emotions, integrating the hard emotions. The ones that we don’t particularly like to have or to feel in our lives is a skillset that can start early, but carries on through adolescence and into young adulthood that we’re continuing to develop. We’re really continuing to develop it all our lives, let’s face it. But for children that work gets started. The ability to know that we can in fact do hard things and to incorporate feelings like guilt or anxiety, uncertainty, the tensions that come from ambiguities into our lives instead of putting those over there in search of either denying or covering up whatever is making those, generating those feelings and trying to stay in the sort of ‘happy hope’ mode all the time.

Instead, recognizing that there’s a kind of oscillation that we experience where sometimes we’re feeling very hopeful in like, okay, we’ve got this and we can do this. And then we go into a valley where we’re struggling with feeling ashamed about the way we’ve contributed to the demise of a species or contributed to the situation where these weather events are happening. And so we need to learn how to take that in and be with it and not just cover it over and react. So the parenting piece of that is about walking with children towards developing their capacities to manage the complexity of a whole range of climate emotions. And there are resources for this, like the Climate Mental Health Network (CMHN). Parents could go there and find resources for things like the wheel, the Climate Emotions Wheel that they could draw on and use with the children that are in a household, a religious education context of wherever they are encountering children.
But parents can do this with their children to begin to name and acknowledge a whole range of emotions that come up for us when we’re confronted with the crisis of the moment we’re in with the climate change that we’re experiencing and learning how to manage those and how to be with them and to honor the full range of emotions. Maybe also things like creating rituals that could include hope and prayers of lament and commitment, taking actions and these sorts of things with children that incorporate children’s, very embodied experience of ritual as a kind of helpful container for acknowledging, holding the complexity of experience, of emotional experiences, that are a part of this.

Karen-Marie:
Thank you so much, Joyce, for not only talking about and describing what climate anxiety looks like in actual children, but also helping us think about what are some of the concrete things and places that we can go for resources to really support children as they build a stronger connection to the natural world, to the transcendent forces that make that world, and to the people and other aspects around them that really help them be happy, whole and healthy people. Thanks so much.

Erin:
Thank you, Joyce.