When kids and teenagers think about the future, they have an extra burden: They have to deal with more of it than adults. An adult might look at the United Nations’ most recent climate report, which models the long-term effects of failing to contain the rise in global temperatures, and figure they’ll be long gone before the worst of the floods and firestorms hit. Which of course misses the point that climate change is already killing people, and that we need immediate action to keep it from getting worse.
Kids today are facing 70, 80, 90 more years of this stuff. Tara Crandon, a psychologist at the QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute and the University of Queensland in Australia, hears these kinds of fears from her young patients. “Some of the young people that I've seen in practice are talking about not wanting to have children,” says Crandon. “Or ‘What's the meaning in life, when this is what my future is going to look like?’ It sort of doesn't seem like anything's really being done about climate change. I think that's a massive contributor to the kind of anxiety that we're seeing for young people, because they are having to look so far ahead into their future, and through the lens of climate change that future looks really bleak.”
Crandon wanted to learn about what influences this anxiety for young people, so she coauthored a paper, published in January in the journal Nature Climate Change, overviewing factors like where the child lives, their family life, and their school community. The team concluded that, counterintuitively, anxiety can actually be a helpful thing when it comes to confronting the climate crisis—at least when processed correctly. In their paper, the researchers call climate anxiety “an adaptive response to a real threat, as well as a potential cause of impairment.”
WIRED sat down with Crandon to talk about why that is, why kids and teens are particularly vulnerable to climate anxiety, and what parents and professionals who work with young people can do about it. (This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.)
WIRED: It would be great to define climate anxiety and climate grief, two terms we’ve heard a lot about recently. What’s the difference?
Tara Crandon: The really big difference between climate anxiety and climate grief is that grief is more of a mourning response. It's more about longing and loss—things that have happened now, or in the past, that we're losing. Whereas anxiety is more something that's anticipating the future. And that might be losses, but it's more of a fear, worry, and dread.
I work with a lot of young people and children in my practice and started to notice them really coming in and talking about this existential fear and worry about climate change. And I started to notice as well that some would respond in really different ways. For some young people, that's letting that anxiety drive them into looking for ways that they can do something meaningful for themselves, for their values, for the planet—drawing on hope, and really responding in helpful ways. And then I noticed as well that there were other young people who become overwhelmed and frozen by that same anxiety. Maybe they feel more helpless, hopeless. That anxiety starts to get in the way of them being able to live their lives meaningfully.
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Anxiety is adaptive in humans—it’s a good survival tool if you need to be on the lookout for something like a lion in the bush. But with climate change, it’s dealing with something on a much larger scale.
A lot of the things that people experience anxiety for these days in society might not necessarily be as threatening as encountering a lion in the wild. But that's not the case for climate change because we know that climate change does have very real consequences and global ramifications. And this anxiety is a very natural, very rational response to those threats. With climate anxiety, we do need to experience some level of anxiety to be able to do anything about it. We won't be able to continue our future if we don't address climate change, and we won't be motivated to act if we're not feeling anxious about that.
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So we're not trying to get rid of anxiety at all for young people, or reduce it in any way. What we want to try and do is support those young people in channeling that anxiety so that they can keep on living meaningful lives and try and do something that is helpful for the planet. And a lot of that comes with needing to support young people—coming together as a community and sharing that burden and that anxiety amongst the many. Because it is a really big ask to have them deal with that on their own.
Can you elaborate on what it means to channel that anxiety in healthy ways?
Yes, it's engaging with organizations. It might be action at their own personal level. It might be connecting with their community. It might be drawing upon their cultural heritage so that they're able to implement their cultural knowledge into climate mitigation or action. It might even be things that are on a smaller scale just meaningful for them. It doesn't necessarily mean that we're asking all young people to become climate activists. We just want to be able to find the ways that they can use that anxiety and turn it around into something that's a little bit more hopeful, or where they can feel a sense of empowerment, maybe, or connection with other people and with the planet.
In the paper, you write that kids are physiologically different than adults—both in how they handle climate change, and in how they handle anxiety about it.
They're less able to adapt to heat, and they consume more food and oxygen relative to their size. So that means they're at greater risk of things like malnutrition or dehydration, risks that come with lack of access to resources.
Chronic stress and anxiety in childhood and adolescence can actually have long-term implications for how the brain develops. This is absolutely an age range where they are at greater risk simply because of their physical, developmental, and structural differences from adults.
How do inequities play into this? Even in an economically developed nation like the United States, we have a problem with the urban heat-island effect, where disadvantaged communities are objectively, quantifiably more at risk because they don't have as much vegetation to cool things off.
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If we're thinking about education, it might mean that young people don’t have access to continued programs that can help them channel their anxiety. Financial differences mean that different families might not actually be able to implement changes that they need to, as climate change evolves.
You also bring up the notion of agency among young people. Unlike adults, they can’t go out in the world and do whatever they want.
An adult who's climate anxious can actually take some really concrete steps to reduce their ecological footprint. But young people, they have to go through these processes where they might have to speak to their parents about it, speak to their teachers about it, speak to their friends about it. There's a little bit more gatekeeping around their ability to control and manage that anxiety through action. So the really important thing there is that families, teachers, peers, communities are able to give young people those opportunities where they can use their voice, where they're able to act, where they’re able to gain a little bit of control.
From a very basic parenting level, how can parents talk to their kids about climate anxiety?
They really just need to ask their young person or their child how they're feeling about climate change, and just listen. It's not necessarily that they have to talk about climate change in all the best ways and the correct ways. It may even just be creating space where the young person can feel safe, and where they can express their emotions and ask for what they need.
A little bit more actively, parents should really try to give opportunities to their children, whether that's as small as recycling in your own home, whether that's purchasing secondhand goods, through teaching them to take public transport, through modeling their own behavior of doing that. They should help them to be able to use their voice, whether that's taking them to climate marches or helping them to connect to a like-minded group of peers who also really care about climate change.
Parents do need to be aware that they have their own valid feelings about climate change as well. It’s important to be honest with your young person or your child about how you're feeling—obviously, not trying to scare them or to make them feel like climate change is something that is an impending doom. But to be able to just model that it's OK to express those feelings and it's OK to sometimes take a break and disconnect from the issue. They should just kind of give themselves that self-compassion and that space as well because it's a really difficult situation for parents to be in, where they're having to help their children manage these feelings about the future.
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