How to Talk to Your Kids About Climate Change: Turning Angst into Action

"There definitely is that, and the author is very aware of the differences between doing this at different ages. Teenagers and young adults will often be educating their parents and becoming activists themselves. But one thing she says about that, which I think is really important—and I talk about this too—is this idea that the fact that young people are really active in this is not a reason for parents not to be doing anything themselves. We have a core responsibility to be acting on this and this is something that I’ve tried to fill out philosophically. We can enhance and work with what our children do, but we can’t just leave it to them. Shugarman is an experienced climate activist and educator, a communicator on climate change. She provides a whistlestop tour of the climate science and politics and then talks interestingly about the emotional processes that parents will sometimes need to go through to be able to talk to their children about this. She does this in a very age-appropriate way, starting with young children and engaging them more with nature or reading stories to them that bear on the question, then working through to talking to teenagers in a different way about the more complex politics and the science. Again, she stresses how important it is that this is a conversation rather than a parent laying down the law. One thing I really like about Shugarman’s approach is precisely that it recognizes that this is a collective challenge. She foregrounds the need to talk to children about climate activism and model that for them. She makes clear that this is not about whether you as an individual are using plastic or paper straws, this is about the fact that the biggest fossil fuel companies are continuing to produce huge amounts of greenhouse gas emissions, that what we need is political action to change that. The key thing is playing a part, working with others to try and change what happens collectively. She draws on her experience as a climate activist, and how she’s involved her children in that along the way This is not just about how we can teach our children to recycle. As you say, this is a very difficult thing to talk about. But children are already aware of it, they’re already scared. So the point is to be open with them in an age-appropriate way. She also talks very interestingly about the constant difficulty of managing our emotions around climate change: learning to do that. It’s also crucial to think about how we can build hope actively, by actually trying to be part of progress, rather than sitting back and saying, ‘Someone else will solve it.’ As it happens, I wrote an article for The Guardian last year on the moral case for civil disobedience to justify things like the Just Stop Oil protests. I’m not speaking for Shugarman here, just giving my own thoughts, but I’d say that, again, this has to be age-appropriate. When they’re older, I expect I’d be quite happy to talk to my kids about when I thought it might be justified to break the law, i.e. if the government wasn’t upholding its part of the bargain to protect them and others in future generations, which is what’s currently happening with climate change. But I’d also want to make sure they understood the nuances of the philosophical argument, as well as the more pragmatic considerations involved! Yes, exactly. Principled, specific, reasonable law-breaking on a special issue is the essence of civil disobedience. This isn’t about saying ‘the law doesn’t mean anything to me’, in some ways, it’s the exact opposite. Thank you. The short answer is that I became a parent. As a philosopher, I’ve written about climate justice and ethics for around fifteen years now. I’ve always known that these issues are important. I’ve talked about them with numerous students, I’ve taught courses on them. Then I had my first daughter, then my second, and these issues became highly personal and salient in a new way. It’s their future that’s at stake. From then on, it really mattered to me to think about how what we owe our children fits with this wider moral question that I was already interested in: what it means to be a decent global citizen. The book weaves together my various different perspectives. I’m a philosopher now, but I used to be a journalist. I was able to use that experience and interview people from other disciplines, including activists, scientists and psychologists. That was absolutely crucial. I also wrote it very much as a mother. It’s an unusual opportunity for a professional philosopher to be able to combine the personal and the philosophical like that."