Kids are worried, but also angry about climate change
Parents aren’t getting it, and that’s a problem.
“Hey, Mom,” Cyan Cuthbert, 15, asked one day after class at Walter B. Saul High School in Philadelphia. “Did you know we’re gonna die because people like to litter?”
Like a lot of youngsters, Cuthbert, a freshman, is obsessed with climate change, a big topic at the school, which specializes in the study of agriculture and the environment. Grownups, she said with astonishment, are simply not scared enough of melting polar ice caps and acidifying oceans.
“It’s not registered in our parents’ heads yet,” Cuthbert continued. “I want a job, a house, kids someday. But I can’t have that if the Earth is on fire, and my children won’t ever know what an elephant is.”
Aggrieved, bewildered, and fueled by the cleareyed righteousness of youth, students chafe at what they see as the ghastly ignorance and unforgivable inattention of elders who wrecked Eden and are now preparing to pass it down, ruined and burning, to their children.
While no precise data exists on how climate change manifests itself in children’s behavior, it’s becoming clear that kids’ perpetual presence on social media and the internet stokes zealous preoccupation and incites a woke attitude that can’t be extinguished.
“Kids are freaked out and terrified,” said Washington, D.C., psychiatrist Lise Van Susteren, who served as an expert witness in Juliana v. the United States, a lawsuit brought in U.S. District
Court in Oregon in 2015 by young people claiming to have a constitutional right to be protected from climate change. The case was dismissed in January.
“Some are unraveling, and the little ones have no coping mechanisms,” she said. “One 4-year-old believes his family dog will become extinct and die. Some older kids are wondering why they should even bother going to college. Many fear having children of their own.
“Young people are really feeling awful.”
Mental health experts across America are hearing kids express the same worries about the planet, noted Susan Clayton, a professor of psychology at the College of Wooster in Ohio. “Older adolescents are more concerned than adults,” she said. “Child psychologists are saying their patients are constantly talking about this.”
While climate change troubles many kids, the children of parents who say it’s all a hoax must deal with the same worries, “only on steroids,” noted Van Susteren. “That’s because parents are standing in the way of actions that children know are essential for their survival.”
Disciples of Greta Thunberg, the 17-year-old Swedish activist who has intoned, “I want you to panic” about climate change, American youngsters begin worrying at early ages. They often first fret about the plight of animals — koalas perishing in Australian firestorms, polar bears struggling with a puddling icescape.
Kids get older and begin to believe that grown-ups are not willing to tackle the tough issues.
“It’s the same with gun violence,” said Robin Gurwitch, a Duke University Medical Center expert on traumatized children.
She explained that the outspoken students from Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, where 17 youngsters were killed in February 2018, became anti-gun activists when they detected grownups’ unwillingness to engage. “They said to adults, ‘If you won’t do something, we’ll stand up,’ ” Gurwitch said.
In a sunlit room in Saul High School, Cyan Cuthbert and her friends met with Gregory Smith, a natural-resource management teacher.
“Many parents can’t teach climate change because they don’t know it,” Smith said. “So it’s up to the parents to listen to their kids.”