Saving Greta What it’s like to father a teenage icon
Svante Thunberg, father of the teen icon, is less interested in saving the world than in saving his daughter, says Rosa Silverman
She has become the mononymous young face of the climate crisis, inspiring millions with her words and actions, despite her tender age. Earlier this month, she was named Time magazine’s person of the year and, according to Sir David Attenborough, she has “woken up the world” to climate change, achieving what many of those who have been working on the issue for 20 years had failed to do.
But Greta Thunberg’s critics would tell a very different story: one in which the teenage activist has been brainwashed and pushed on to the global stage by her parents – a Swedish couple supposedly pulling the strings for ill-defined reasons of their own.
Yesterday, Svante Thunberg, the 50-year-old actor and Greta’s father, addressed this theory directly. Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, he stated, firmly: “When she decided to do this, we said quite clearly that we would not support it.”
Questioned by presenter Mishal Husain as to why, he explained: “Obviously, we thought it was a bad idea – putting yourself out there with all the hate on social media, and just the idea of your own daughter putting herself at the very front line of such a huge question like climate change.”
Not only had they categorically not encouraged their then 14-year-old daughter to skip school for her first climate strike, he told listeners, they had even gone so far as to warn her:
“If you are going to do it, you’re going to have to do it by yourself.”
So she did – but by March, millions had joined her, and she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. In September, she addressed the UN Climate Action Summit, telling world leaders in a tearful and passionate speech: “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.”
To some, the 16-year-old is a saviour: the teller of an inconvenient truth to a world with selective hearing. “I don’t want you to listen to me,” she said. “I want you to listen to the scientists.”
But there are many others who don’t want to listen to either, preferring instead to attack Thunberg’s parents, spreading a set of Trumpian “alternative facts” behind their family’s story.
In a video posted on Youtube in September, American political commentator Sara Gonzales countered: “You know who stole your childhood, girl? Your damn parents, who decided that fame and political agendas were more important than preserving their own child’s innocence.” Her video, called
“Greta
Thunberg has TERRIBLE parents”, has been viewed more than 137,000 times.
The same month, Andrew Bolt, the host for Sky News Australia, told the channel: “I have such contempt for all the adults who made this girl cry with their global warming lies.” And in her own country, Jimmie Åkesson, the leader of the Sweden Democrats, a far-right political party, has condemned Greta’s actions as a “staged PR campaign” to promote her mother, the 49-year-old opera singer Malena Ernman’s, book.
All of which, her parents insist, could not be further from the truth. Opening up about the effect of fame on his daughter, who has Asperger’s syndrome, Svante said he accompanied her when she sailed to UN climate summits in New York and Madrid, not “to save the climate” but “to save my child”.
Greta had struggled with depression for “three or four years” before she began her school strike. “She stopped talking… she stopped going to school,” he said, adding that it was the “ultimate nightmare for a parent” when she began refusing to eat.
During the next few years, however, they began discussing and researching climate change, with Greta becoming “energised” by her parents’ change in behaviour to help the environment. Among these changes was her mother’s decision to no longer travel by plane and her father’s conversion to veganism.
This rare peek behind the scenes of Greta’s journey, revealed a father who had watched as his singular child found a new purpose, which she’d pursued despite his reservations. “I have two daughters and, to be honest, they are all that matters to me,” he said. “I just want them to be happy.”
Teenage activists who attain the kind of global recognition Greta has are notably few and far between. The only obvious comparison from recent times is with Malala Yousafzai, the young Pakistani activist for female education, who was shot by the Taliban in 2012 in a failed attempt on her life. As Husain pointed out in her interview with Svante, it was also asked of Malala whether her father was pushing her to speak out. The implication in both cases is clear: that behind a young girl with opinions must be adults who are feeding them to her, to further their own nefarious aims.
Carly Jones – the mother of Honey, a girl with autism who addressed the United Nations aged 14 – poured scorn on the notion that anyone is manipulating Greta. “Anyone who thinks she is somebody’s puppet is … greatly mistaken,” she wrote in these pages in September. “Just try and tell a young person on the spectrum what to do, and you’ll find you won’t get very far.”
Yet the conspiracy theories persist. “If [Svante] was an ‘ordinary’ parent I might be interested in listening to his opinion, but he’s a climate activist who’s brainwashed his poor daughter – I actually feel sorry for her,” was one of the sceptical responses to the interview on Twitter.
Why does this matter? According to Extinction Rebellion, the global environmental movement that organised street demonstrations this year, attempts to undermine Greta are a “dead cat” distraction from her cause.
“Climate issues are greater than any family dynamics, and anyone who listened to the love and concern of Greta’s father will appreciate that her pleas are her own, and not the result of familial pressure,” says Alannah Travers, an XR spokesman. “Attempts to discredit and distract from her cause by criticising her family merely accentuate the power of her argument. Perversely, it shows how far the climate movement has come that the president of the United States and other demagogues are using personalities to detract from the real issues.”
And, quite often, they’re succeeding. Greta’s father called out as “fake news” all the things that “people try to fabricate” about her, and admitted he was worried about “the hate that that generates”. But his well-meaning attempt to set the record straight about his daughter is unlikely to silence those who, for whatever reason, would rather not hear what she has to say.
‘Try and tell a young person on the spectrum what to do, and you won’t get far’
‘We said quite clearly we would not support [her school strike]’