How to talk to kids about climate change

Parents have delicate conversations on tough topics with their kids — about intimacy, violence, even the meaning of life.

Now, kids want to talk about climate change.

Parents, are you prepped for that talk?

"Parents need help. ... There’s so many hard conversations," Harriet Shugarman, executive director of ClimateMama, says. "But if we can empower kids to be part of the solutions, then we’re well on our way."

Today, On Point: How to talk to kids about climate change.

Elizabeth Rush, teaches creative nonfiction writing at Brown University. Author of "The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth" and "Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore."

Harriet Shugarman, executive director of ClimateMama. Author of "How to Talk to Your Kids About Climate Change: Turning Angst into Action."

Kottie Christie-Blick, climate change education consultant and former teacher.

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: The United Nations COP28 climate conference is underway in Dubai. World leaders are hashing out how to respond to rapid changes in the world's climate. The negotiations themselves can be stuffy, bureaucratic affairs. Debates over punctuation or whether to use the word will versus shall in a lengthy policy document.

But on Friday, Romanian youth climate activist, Mara Ghilan, took the stage with a decidedly not bureaucratic message for the world's leaders before her.

MARA GHILAN: You usually tell us that we give you hope, but we're not here to give you hope, nor are we here to pay the consequences of failed leadership. We're here to make you realize our world, as we know, is in your hands.

And that you, your excellences, have the power to build or to destroy.

CHAKRABARTI: This is On Point. I'm Meghna Chakrabarti. A 2021 global survey of people between the ages of 16 and 25 found that almost 60% of them reported being very or extremely worried about climate change. In a separate poll of 13- to 29-year-olds conducted by PBS NewsHour and The Generation Lab, 34% of young people said climate change would impact their decision about whether to one day have kids of their own.

So there they are. Two of the ways to think about the intergenerational impact of climate change. How do you talk about it with the young people in your lives now? And what can give hope and confidence to climate conscious people considering having children in the future? Those are our areas of focus today, and we're going to start with Elizabeth Rush.

She's an environmental writer. Her most recent book is "The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth." She's also previously author of "Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore," which was the Pulitzer Prize finalist in general nonfiction. Elizabeth also teaches creative nonfiction at Brown University.

Elizabeth Rush, welcome to the program.

ELIZABETH RUSH: Thanks so much for having me, Meghna.

CHAKRABARTI: So let's go back a ways. I don't know how many years you want to go back, but when was it that you first thought about, maybe starting a family of your own?

RUSH: I would say it was probably about a decade ago. So I'm 39 now and right around the time when I was 30, I started to feel like, "Okay, I finally have a somewhat stable income. I have a loving partner." The pieces felt in place for me to potentially have a family. And yet, I was also, and am an environmentalist, and so even then, it was a complicated question. What does it mean to want to have a child right now as the climate crisis accelerates?

CHAKRABARTI: How did you answer that question? First of all, it's very profound. What does it mean to want to have a child? Even outside of a climate crisis. I can understand how it was even more complex for you, but how did you answer that question for yourself?

RUSH: I put it off for a while, and I think I felt a lot of anxiety, guilt, shame.

Sometimes I felt ashamed to even admit that this was something that I wanted. Cause I knew that the child I would bring into the world would, in some ways, make that world less livable by contributing to our climate crisis, by consuming sort of different fossil fuels, just because the society we live in.

And I also worried about the impact that future sort of climate instability might have on that child. So I definitely put it off for a while. And quite frankly, then I found myself invited to participate in a National Science Foundation mission to Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica, which is like ground zero for future sea level rise.

And to go on that mission, I had to postpone pregnancy for another year. So I carried this desire with me definitely towards this glacier that was falling apart.

CHAKRABARTI: Can I just pause you there for one second, Elizabeth? Just tell us quickly for a minute about that glacier. Because it is very important, and I'm not sure that many people have heard of it.

RUSH: Sure. The Thwaites Glacier is commonly called the Doomsday Glacier, so maybe folks know it by that name. The reason it has this moniker is because it's the size of Florida, and it contains enough ice to raise global sea levels two feet. People also think of it as the cork to the West Antarctic ice shelf.

And if we lose all of the ice in West Antarctica, we'll see global sea level rise rates of 10 feet or more. And the question is really, how much ice are we going to lose and how fast? But at the time, no one had ever been to the calving edge of the Thwaites Glacier. So our mission was first to go there.

And so we got to carry back some really important data, which was fascinating to be a part of.

CHAKRABARTI: But then also fascinating scientifically and environmentally for you, but you said you were carrying this anxiety and guilt about what could be your own personal choices.

RUSH: Yeah, to be honest, it felt, how would I put it?

It felt dangerous to link these desires. I was like, okay I want to have a baby and I want to see this glacier that's falling apart, up close. And I thought I would get to Thwaites and somehow seeing like reckoning with the human impact that we're having on Iceland and the Antarctic, I thought that I would come home with some of that desire to have a child dampened, and it didn't really go away and that surprised me.

So there was a kind of reckoning that I didn't expect.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Okay. So I want to hear about that reckoning in a second. But, first of all, I appreciate how candid you're being about your own personal life choices. It's never an easy thing to do in public. But second of all, it is like really striking me to my core, Elizabeth, that you use the words guilt and even shame in thinking about would you want to become a mother?

And those are so heavy emotions, right? To put on one person when, or for a person to put on themselves, let me put it that way. When the climate change, as you know better than anyone, is this massive global phenomenon. Now, and I was just thinking, I'm not sure how that many, how many people let's say outside Western countries, which are sort of high carbon producers, if they ever think about, Should I have another child? But also, you're very scientifically minded.

Or you knew at that time that your one child really was not going to make anything beyond a fractional difference in what's driving climate change. So how did this turn into something that went from a global problem to shame that you put on yourself?

RUSH: I think anyone who's really paying attention in the environmental conversation, probably thinks in a very specific way about carbon consumption, right?

We've all seen those bar graphs, how much CO2 will I keep in the ground if I take public transportation instead of driving my car? What impact will going meatless for a year have? And so I think we've been taught to think in a very specific way about what individual actions can reduce the amount of CO2 that's being pumped into the atmosphere.

And even though I know as someone who like studies climate change, even though I know a single person's choices aren't making the future unlivable, it's actually a kind of logic and a kind of rhetoric that seeped so far into me that I was certainly thinking about, what does it mean to put a child onto this planet?

And in those same bar graphs, you often see there's one line that rises high above, and that's having a child. It's oh, forget about getting a Prius, just don't have a baby and your carbon impact will be lessened. I think I always felt some kind of skepticism, like there was a categorical error there.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah.

RUSH: But that didn't mean that I didn't feel guilty for wanting to have a child.

CHAKRABARTI: Because the different parts of the mind don't often cooperate with each other. So we have a lot of listeners who, after we do, or before or after we do climate conversations, they call in or email and say, "Yeah, I'm one of those people, I don't think it's a smart thing to bring a child into the world now because of climate."

But you said that there's a rhetoric that's seeped so deeply. Where did that rhetoric start, Elizabeth?

RUSH: I found out from reading a really impactful piece of writing called "Is it OK to have a child?" by Meehan Crist. I found out when I was a couple months pregnant with my child that British petroleum actually spent hundreds of millions of dollars in 2005 to popularize the idea of the carbon footprint, and they actually created carbon footprint calculators, and they did this nationwide advertising campaign, and it was so cloyingly simple. It's, "What's a carbon footprint? Everybody has one. Click on this link to figure out what yours is."

And I found out that fossil fuel companies were really responsible for shifting blame away from themselves and onto the individual for CO2 emissions.

CHAKRABARTI: You must consider, or I consider this, one of the most spectacularly successful acts of marketing I have ever heard of. Because if a campaign like that launched to shift attention from the biggest carbon emitters to an individual person, and the person ends up understanding or absorbing that message so profoundly that it overwhelms the human being's fundamental desire to propagate the species.

There can't be a bigger win than that for a corporation.

RUSH: I'm nodding along and getting goosebumps. Exactly. I remember finding this out and it was literally the first time in almost a decade that I just put that guilt down. I was like, "Okay fossil fuel companies should not play a role in my reproductive decision making."

And it also made me incredibly angry because I hear my students share these same concerns all the time. It's like some part of me just wanted to say, "Get out of my womb. You're not invited. You're not invited to that decision."

CHAKRABARTI: Elizabeth, hang on for a second because we have to take a quick break.

And as you let slip, you are a mother now. So now you've also got the challenge of thinking about how to talk to your child and soon to be kids about climate change, because, of course, the problem has not gone away. So we have a lot more to talk about.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI:  Elizabeth, I wanted to give you a chance to finish your thought about what or how you respond when students in your Brown University classes say, "I don't want to have a child because of the climate chaos all around me."

RUSH: Gosh, that's something I hear really frequently, and there's some part of me that thinks part of what's happening in the subtext of those comments is something along the lines of, "I've watched my parents recycle.

I've watched my parents put in heat pumps. I've watched the climate conversation unfold and nothing that we do at this kind of individual level seems to be making a dent in it. So what if I make the largest sacrifice I can humanly imagine? Might that be enough?"

And I feel a tremendous sadness and responsibility towards them because I think that way of thinking, again, has been foisted upon them by fossil fuel companies.

And we talk in my classes often about what can you achieve by working collectively with other people? And we think about that even as writers, we think of writers as working alone, but actually all writing is done in community. And I think all change will be done in community, as well.

So I try to find the inflection point, the crossover between those two ideas.

CHAKRABARTI: This is the perfect opportunity to move to the next part of what we wanted to look at today. And that is how to talk with children in your life, whether they're your own or relatives or in a classroom, who are already here, right?

And who definitely have questions about all the change and the crisis that they're hearing about, and, in many senses, living through right now. So let me just play this quick clip from Lise Van Susteren. She's a psychiatrist specializing in the psychological impacts of climate change. And she told PBS NewsHour about the different ways climate anxiety affects her youngest patients.

LISE VAN SUSTEREN: Kids have told me that they don't want to pursue a secondary education. What's the point? Kids have said, of course, that they don't want to have children because they don't want to bring a child into the chaos. And then there are other kids who just become anxious by themselves and might take all sorts of responses. Maybe, eating disorders. Some people. Or just a general feeling of apathy.

CHAKRABARTI: All right. That was Lise Van Susteren on the PBS NewsHour. Joining us now is Harriet Shugarman. She's executive director of ClimateMama. And also, author of "How to Talk to Your Kids About Climate Change: Turning Angst into Action."

Harriet, welcome to the show.

HARRIET SHUGARMAN: Thanks so much, Meghna.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so you've been listening along as Elizabeth has shared her story. I first of all just wanted to ask you what were some of your responses or thoughts in what we thought Elizabeth said.

SHUGARMAN: Oh, my goodness, I had so many, so I loved your conversation, I think also that choice to have a child is a very personal one, and we don't know, too, is that child going to be the child that changes the world in a very positive way? And this idea that one person, can't affect change, we see all the time, movements started by one person and then that builds. And in the climate youth movement with Greta Thunberg. And now there's so many young people that have joined in all over the world.

And that hoisted upon us by BP, this idea of the carbon footprint, and is similar to the Keep America Beautiful campaign, that bottling companies started when all of a sudden, who was going to pay for drinks in plastic instead of cans that had to be recycled? They made us think it was our job to do that.

So we have to take back that ownership.

CHAKRABARTI: I swear I'm going to do a show in the future, in the hopefully the near future, about this BP story. It just blows my mind. But I also want to acknowledge for a second that when we hear from listeners who don't want or decide they don't want to have children, it's for a variety of different reasons, right?

It's not exclusively because of climate change, but sometimes climate change factors into that. I'm actually much more interested in the people who say, specifically because of climate change, I do not want to have children. So that was the context that that part of the conversation came in.

Now, though, let's look to the future. Elizabeth, how old is your oldest child, if I can put it that way?

RUSH: Yes. I have a son. He's three and a half years old and I am pregnant with my second.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay.

RUSH: Yeah.

CHAKRABARTI: And so I imagine that your son has a lot of questions, because children do.

Does he ask you about things that he's noticing around the world? Or ask you, I know he's three and a half, but ask you about things, maybe, I don't know if he goes to daycare, but, or heard somewhere about how the world is changing?

RUSH: I'm not sure that he's quite there yet, developmentally, but something that I think is really fascinating is, as I'm sure you can imagine, we talk about climate change all the time in my house, and we've made, my husband and I have made no effort to shield him from the fact that our climate is changing.

And recently he was talking about how warm it was on a day in November. And he said something like, "That's strange. That's climate change." And I was like, "Yeah, it is. You're right." And so he gets it. And I think there's some part of me that finds it really meaningful that there's this whole generation of young people for whom climate change is not like a shift from a baseline that they knew when they were younger, but it is instead the world that they are growing up in.

CHAKRABARTI: Exactly. I've noticed that similarly with my offsprings, as I like to call them on the show. That's a fundamental difference that I don't think a lot of adults consider when talking about climate change to their children, because Harriet, let's stick with this younger age group for a moment. There's a profound difference in talking to little kids about something serious in a tone of catastrophizing versus awareness, right?

So I think my suspicion is that because of how it's talked about in the media, how adults generally talk about it, because we all remember when it snows, it used to snow in October or whatever in snowy regions of the country, that we tend to catastrophize climate change. That doesn't feel like, no one's doing it on purpose, but that doesn't feel like the right tone to take with a young child.

SHUGARMAN: No, absolutely not, and we shouldn't do that, and there's many ways to bring the conversation to the table. Just as Elizabeth was saying, it's part of their conversation around the home. So her children are going to hear that. And it's exciting, actually, this alpha generation, these kids that are born as part of the climate, climate change, and its very real ways that they're just going to live it and are already living it.

So there's new programming on television, there's books there. It's just, it's going to be, and is, part of our children's lives. And it doesn't have to be and shouldn't be in that scary way. Let's help them really understand and have a love for nature. Let's help them see other young people taking action.

Let's see, have them see their parents' doing things that kids just have, especially very young kids, right? Their world is their home, their room. So how can you bring that there in a positive way? How can they help you save energy? Can you have meetings about, what's our climate plan? What's our family going to do?

Can we draw a picture and send it to our local mayor? There's so many things that in a very positive way, we can introduce this. Do you take the subway? Why are we taking the subway instead of in a car? Public transportation.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. I'm just, I'm nodding along, Harriet, because I keep thinking of what Lise Van Susteren said in that clip that we played. That young kids are showing signs of anxiety, even to the level of eating disorders, when thinking about climate change.

So maybe it's our moral obligation as adults, when we're engaging with them in the topic, to not catastrophize. Because, Harriet, do you think that it's possible that even just the way people who are feeling anxiety in their own hearts, because they're communicating that anxiety to their kids, are actually causing some of that anxiety?

SHUGARMAN: I think that can absolutely be the case. And I love that you played that piece by Lise, I'm actually working with her on something called the Ecopsychepedia, which would be, which is an online free resource on the connection between mental health and climate. And so we got this idea that climate invokes anxiety, it does. And with young people and so we need the words and language. And it should, right?

It's a catastrophe, for older kids, for all of us, what we have done. It's almost awe inspiring, right? We've changed our natural world in a way, as a singular species, and that is incredible and terrifying and yet. So to feel angst about these issues, totally normal. And so we need to bring that back into the conversation, too.

But for ourselves, have a way to not bring that to our youngest children or talk to our kids about that.

CHAKRABARTI: It seems, in a sense, almost a frame shift is required. Because you spoke a little earlier about actually, especially for young children, teaching them a love of nature, a more effective and emotionally appropriate way to approach this.

And Elizabeth, this links back to a lot of things that you said earlier, specifically how we're now in a culture where individuals have learned how to feel guilt upon themselves. We don't want to do that to kids. So when we talk about teaching the love of nature, for example, that must be something you do with your son.

And how do you do that?

RUSH: It's fascinating. I've been nodding along for this whole conversation as well. And some part of me thinks, I just want to take 1 second and say, to have climate anxiety manifest as like an eating disorder. To me, that's partly about trying to control what feels out of control.

And there's so much that we can do in terms of modeling behavior around what we can participate in and how we shape our climate futures together. So something, I feel like two things that I do with my son that feel really important are I've worked on shifting my language, like who does the acting in my sentences? Instead of saying," Say hi to the beach tree in the yard when we get home." I'll be like, "Hey, Nico, look, the beach tree is saying hi to you.

Look, it's shimmering its leaves at you." Because I want him to think about the more than human world as actors in their own right, and that we're in this kind of conversation with nature. That it's not just humans that can reach out to nature, take care of nature. Nature also takes care of us.

And so I do that. And I also, I think, to the point that was made earlier, I do a little bit of climate organizing work and I tell him about it. We also have childcare available at our meetings, so that our kids can see us getting together and working with one another for a more just, livable future.

I think that those kinds of behaviors are really important to display.

CHAKRABARTI: What does giving more, how am I going to put this, animation to the natural world around your son, right? And I mean that in terms of seeing the life in other things. What do you think that, what do you hope it might empower him to do in the future?

As he lives for himself and for how he sees the world?

RUSH: I think of something that a colleague of mine, she said to me once. Around this kind of question of bemoaning the slow rate of change. Are we responding to this crisis fast enough? And she said, "We're in an intergenerational relay race." And when I think about helping him, not just see, but maintain his knowledge of the more than human world is alive. I think kids actually do a lot of this on their own, anyways.

And then we beat it out of them over time. When I'm doing that, I'm really hoping that part of what happens is that his entire worldview shifts to be fundamentally aware. That we don't survive without the survival of the planet, as a place where flourishing is possible for all different kinds of species.

I think that I'm actually trying to impact like a worldview shift that isn't inherent in Western consciousness right now.

CHAKRABARTI: Elizabeth Rush, author of "The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth." That's her most recent book about the world we live in now. Thank you so much for joining us today.

RUSH: It's been my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

CHAKRABARTI: Harriet, give me some more examples. We'll talk about older kids and teens after the break. But give me a quick example of a dialogue that you might encourage a parent to have, or any adult to have with a child in their life.

SHUGARMAN: I think that we have to ask, listen to our children. And so what do they know? What are they hearing? And with those young children, again, I think we don't have to say, what do you know about climate change? We start those conversations, as Elizabeth was talking about, the importance of the trees and what grows in our neighborhood and watching, whether you live in the middle of a big city or in a environment, that's more rural, and there's a lot of opportunity to enter nature in a more direct way.

What's around your house? What's growing? What grows in season? Do we go to a farmer's market? All kinds of conversations that just begin that conversation about the importance of nature and then maybe how it's changing. We used to have these kind of animals here. They can't live here anymore, or these birds don't come here.

So you can introduce that part about that humans are creating change around us, and what can we do to slow that down.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Or look at the animals that are moving in that weren't in our environment before.

SHUGARMAN: Exactly.

CHAKRABARTI: Why might they be here now?

SHUGARMAN: Exactly.

CHAKRABARTI: Harriet, we just have to take a really quick break here.

And when we come back, we're going to talk about kids in older age groups. Late elementary, middle school, and definitely high schoolers. And our exploration is, today, how do we as adults, talk about climate change with the children in our lives, wherever they might be. So we'll have a lot more about that in a moment.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: Harriet, before we move on to some specific ideas regarding older children, I want to ask you about something that I think applies to kids of any age. And that's media consumption. Because parents or family members, teachers, et cetera, can try to successfully regulate how they're talking with their kids about climate change, but that same self-regulation just doesn't exist in media. Because most of it's designed for adults anyway, right?

I'm thinking of commercial radio, commercial television. Even some of the shows that we've done here, although we have the luxury of more time to provide the kind of context you were talking about, but commercial broadcasting is designed to keep your attention for a short period of time so that you'll watch the ads afterwards, right?

And how do people's attention get captured? Through making them feel very emotional. So it's always going to be an extreme short story about the latest evidence of climate change. That's not, that's like the opposite of what you're saying we should be or how we should be this having these discussions with kids.

So what should family members or adults do about media consumption?

SHUGARMAN: Right. That's a really hard thing to regulate. As you said, Meghna, each family, I think, has their own rules about how they deal with that, particularly with younger kids. But when and if your child says they're afraid about the climate crisis.

Maybe ask them what they heard. What were they listening to? What were they watching? And then dig deeper into it. Because as you said, all those sound bites and a lot of the way that we consume media now is in such short little bites. And it's meant to shock you. Meant to scare you.

And it is scary, and we have to tell the truth. That's a critical component, whether a child is three and a half or 23 and a half. But how we convey that message and the reality of what we're talking about will really depend on their age. And so if we can pull it back and see what it was that upset them, or concerned them and have a more detailed conversation, I think that's really important.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, I feel like I just extremely dated myself because I was focusing on broadcast media. When of course what we should be talking about is social media, right? Which is even shorter, even more titillating, if I can put it that way. But I would guess the same rules apply, right? If someone, if a child says, are we all going to die because the next heat wave is going to hit 60% of the United States and be 100 degrees every day for five months?

I saw that on TikTok, right? So finding out where they heard this or saw this information first still applies.

SHUGARMAN: Absolutely. And, also reassuring them, at least for the moment. And again, that's, coming from where we, this North American perspective, there are things that we can do to build resiliency. Both physical resiliency for our kids' schools, for our homes and our own emotional and mental resiliency.

And then also pointing out that life isn't fair too, right? It isn't the same for somebody, a young child that is growing up on the front lines of climate change in the global South. And so those disparities are important lessons as it relates to the unfolding climate crisis, as well.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, so let's shift our focus here to classrooms for a moment. Because, of course, outside of a family, however it's made up, teachers are one of the largest in adult influences on children of any age, and more and more of those teachers are talking about climate change in classes like science, but also beyond.

Kottie Christie-Blick is currently a climate change educational consultant. Before that, she was in the classroom as a teacher for 30 years. She began teaching climate change to her fourth-grade students back in 2008. And Kottie says she felt it was her responsibility to translate frightening topics into terms kids could connect with.

KOTTIE CHRISTIE-BLICK: Whether we're talking about stranger danger, or now people entering the school with guns, or earthquakes or hurricanes. There's a lot of scary adult stuff going on in the world. Teachers can really play an important part, because they are good at translating the adult world for kids.

CHAKRABARTI: For fourth graders, that could mean playing with water.

To teach about melting ice caps, Christy Blick brought in a plastic bin containing a miniature 3D world. It was complete with mountain ranges, and rivers and towns with tiny houses dotting a little coastline. And then she had her students place a block of ice high up in those mountains.

CHRISTIE-BLICK: And it was just dripping, dripping, and the rivers were filling up and they're flowing down to the ocean level.

And then the ocean starts to rise. And before they know it, the town is completely flooded, and it becomes a very noisy classroom, that they are laughing because it's water play and they're safe seeing this. It's all in miniature. And at the same time they're laughing. I remember hearing a girl say over and over again, "This isn't right. This shouldn't be happening.

That was my house. I had the perfect house with a beautiful view. This isn't right." And she said it over and over again. And it really stuck in my mind, and it came up and above all the cacophony of the rest of the children in there. So when it's miniaturized, you can get the lesson across in a way that isn't too scary.

CHAKRABBARTI: So that's Kottie Christie-Blick sharing one example of how to have age appropriate and productive lessons in the classroom about climate change. Harriet, talk to me about this. If I recall correctly, do you have a direct experience doing this in classrooms?

SHUGARMAN: Actually, I'm a professor in a college and I teach climate change, but I absolutely, I work with teachers.

What an awesome and wonderful teacher Kottie is. I am actually working on a bill for New York State right now that was just released. And in the next legislative session will look to try to have P-12 cross curricular climate education, and that's something that exists only in the state of New Jersey currently. Many states, and it wasn't legislatively required, but teachers worked in conjunction with the First Lady of the state to make that happen. And other states around the United States teach climate in the science realm. But as you said, we can learn so much through art, through drama, through many different subjects.

And having an amazing teacher like Kottie, we don't have that consistently everywhere, or the teacher might not be prepared or feel trained to teach that. We did a survey in New York State a few years ago, or New York City, with all New York City teachers, and the result was that about at 53% we're teaching climate, but at most two hours a year, and that's in New York City.

And because they're not trained, they're unprepared, or they don't have access to lesson plans. And then there was a study done in '21 by Yale Climate Communications, and 78% of people cross a political line, said they wanted their kids to learn about climate change in schools. And so that's really powerful.

That because we have this partisan divide around talking about climate. But that the parents, that people want their children to learn about climate. And in New Jersey now, this has been two years. We're in the second year of teaching it, there was a study that just came out that looked at how are parents now talking to their kids about climate? And because their kids are learning about it, they're having those conversations.

So this point that you raise about teaching it in schools, Meghna, is really critical. And we aren't yet doing that in many places at all. And it's something that as parents, as educators, as uncles and aunts, we can advocate for. Because our kids, as we talked about, they're growing up living the climate emergency, and they should be empowered, not scared.

They should learn about it in school. They should learn every career that any child chooses, should be, will have a climate impact, right?

CHAKRABARTI: And it seems to me that in classrooms, there is the opportunity to go deeper into all the context things that we talked about, into the process of climate change, into the causes that help fuel kids, could help make kids feel like, okay, there's something constructive that perhaps we can do here. Because I understand why it's happening now.

But, when we think about middle schoolers, let's say, and high schoolers, Harriet, this is a time of tremendous change for the young people themselves, right? Internally, developmentally, psychologically. And that makes the world that much more confusing and difficult to deal with. And also, now we're talking about an age of kids who care about this issue.

They may want to do something about it. So what are your recommendations of, let's go back to families for a second, of how to have those conversations with older children and teens?

SHUGARMAN: Yeah exactly. And I think, not every child is going to be, want to be that child that's standing in front of a microphone, there are so many ways of encouraging action around climate. There are many different ways. And, we talked about briefly, and maybe they're a musician. Maybe they want to produce a play at their school that talks about the climate crisis in some way, shape or form. Maybe they want to help their sports teams become more sustainable, not have plastic water bottles.

Maybe they want to help the school save energy. And there are so many ways, shapes and forms that can manifest itself. And so I think, again, really important is to ask your child. What do they know? Or say you were listening to Meghna on NPR today, and she was talking about this, and you are just beginning to learn about the realities of the climate crisis.

It was concerning. It was hopeful, whatever it was and bring out those emotions with, or those discussions with your child. And let them lead because those older kids, as you said, they're hearing about the climate crisis and media from their friends and they, what they may be hearing may not be really what's happening, and you also don't have to pretend to be an expert.

It's so many things, right? As parents, we're required to do all of these, help our children learn all these things. But again, go to those climate scientists that are the experts. Get trusted sources. Because that's critically important, too.

CHAKRABARTI: For all the young people trapped in the backseat of your parents' car right now, being forced to listen to On Point, or if you're in the house and your parents won't let you turn off the radio slash podcast, first of all, hello.

And I'm very glad you're listening to us. And you heard Harriet Shugarman, an expert there, tell you when you want to talk about climate change with your parents, tell them, "Don't make me panic, help me understand. "And also, you can always just jump on Facebook if you want, with your parents' approval, and send us your message or thoughts.

Now Harriet, in the last couple of minutes here, I want to turn back to something that Elizabeth helped us with at the beginning of the show. And that is when she said, it's a climate crisis. Crisis is a nonfactual word, though. It's a very subjective word. Climate change is happening faster now.

Because it's human caused, then it ever has in the history of the planet. That's the factual statement. But when we as adults are feeling it as a crisis, as an emergency, because we knew what existed before. But as Elizabeth said, kids now are being born into this. I guess what I'm trying to get at is one way to help kids with the reality of the climate change they're living with is not to necessarily talk about it in terms of, "Oh my gosh, the world will never be the same." But rather change is happening faster than ever.

In our environment, around the world, but just basically everything in life. So finding different ways, perhaps even non climate related, to teach kids about resilience or build a resilience in them, in the face of change of any kind.

SHUGARMAN: Absolutely. That we need to do that because even though it's an emergency in terms of the fastest changes, that the planet has ever experienced and science shows us for the rest of our children's lives, they will be living climate change and at different times.

It likely will be an emergency, but they need to build their emotional resiliency. They need to be excited about what is their place in helping, for all for all of us to live through and with the climate crisis, they should see themselves as being alive at this moment in the history of humans, where actually what we do matters.

And each one of us, we have a role to play. So we want to empower our children and not shut them down. We want them to see that, yes, this is here. But also, for children, right? My kids, when they were young, three years seem like all of their lives, or a year or six months.

And so I talked to parents, and they have young kids, and they see their parents acting on the climate crisis and then they get so mad at them that they didn't solve it. Because we won't solve the climate crisis. We have to learn how to live with it and as you said, build our resiliency internally and externally.

CHAKRABARTI: very time I think about this, these rising rates of poor mental health, the anxiety, even the phrase climate anxiety is a very common one now, or the eating disorders that we heard about earlier. That's just wrong. Something that cannot be changed overnight, that's a global problem should not be manifest in young people as that kind of hurt and harm.

Providing the basis for a kind of worldview that acknowledges problems, but says, "It won't be solved overnight and here's how you can be strong." It just feels so fundamental to me and that can apply it at any age, Harriet?

SHUGARMAN: Absolutely. And it may be that your children that already have children are just coming into this knowledge or understanding, because they had kids. And so that's the time to start or you just had a child and, Oh my gosh, all of a sudden that's opened up the reality is of the climate crisis. That child, you can talk to them from the beginning. There's lots of places to go for resources. I work with an organization called the Climate Mental Health Network, and there's a resource page for parents that there's all, many places that you don't have to be alone and building community.

Elizabeth talked about the importance of community. There are groups that come together. As parents of very young kids in New York City, we have a group called Climate Families, and it's zero to eight and they're bringing kids together for playdates and their parents happen to be working on climate.

So many ways to help build that resiliency that our children will need for the rest of their live with climate change.