Climate Change: Implications for Parents and Parenting

SYNOPSIS

This tutorial draws together research on the impacts of climate change on children and youth, and suggests how parents, and parenting researchers, educators, and professionals, can engage with climate change. We start with an overview of the science of climate change and highlight the urgency of action to restore a safe climate for future generations. Then we discuss three major types of impact of climate change on children and youth: first, their greater vulnerability to its impacts on health and well-being due to physiological immaturity and dependency, a vulnerability that is greatly exacerbated for children in disadvantaged circumstances; second, evidence of widespread worry about climate change among children and youth, and their need for support and empowerment to respond adaptively to these anxieties; and third, the need to prepare the next generation for demands for massive changes in lifestyles as the world transitions to a low-carbon economy. We follow with a review of evidence about how parents can support their children through actively engaging with the issue themselves and through communication and other strategies that help build children’s hope, efficacy, resilience, and engagement. We then discuss the multiple important roles that parenting researchers and professionals can play in addressing climate change, concluding that those of us with responsibility for future generations need to recognize climate change as an urgent challenge.

ARTICLE INFORMATION

Conflict of Interest Disclosures: Each author signed a form for disclosure of potential conflicts of interest. No authors reported any financial or other conflicts of interest in relation to the work described.

Ethical principles: The authors affirm having followed professional ethical guidelines in preparing this work. These guidelines include obtaining informed consent from human participants, maintaining ethical treatment and respect for the rights of human or animal participants, and ensuring the privacy of participants and their data, such as ensuring that individual participants cannot be identified in reported results or from publicly available original or archival data.

Funding: This work was not supported by any agency funding.

Role of the Funders/Sponsors: None of the funders or sponsors of this research had any role in the design and conduct of the study; collection, management, analysis, and interpretation of data; preparation, review, or approval of the manuscript; or decision to submit the manuscript for publication.

Acknowledgments: The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments on a prior version of this manuscript. The ideas and opinions expressed herein are those of the authors alone, and endorsement by the authors’ institutions is not intended and should not be inferred.

Additional information

Funding

This work was not supported by any agency funding.