Lucy Carne: Stop scaring kids with climate change, you eco-bullies
Yes, the climate is changing. But deliberately inciting climate change fear in children is grossly irresponsible. We need to encourage our kids to feel empowered — not terrified — about the future, writes Lucy Carne.
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This is a story of fear and hysteria.
We were a bunch of 11-year-old girls on school camp, hyped up on WarHeads and Push Pops.
Larking around in the women’s toilets one night, it was all handstands and hollering, until we realised a man was quietly standing behind the closed door of a shower stall.
Hysterical panic swept over us and we ran sobbing for help.
Being kidnapped — lured away from our families with the promise of sweets or a kitten, never to be seen again — was an intense fear of kids in the ’90s.
Generations before us had their childhood terrors — nuclear holocaust, the Red Scare, Yellow Peril.
For today’s kids, it is climate change.
The precarious state of the planet is the new bogeyman terrifying innocents.
And our destructive environmental footprint combined with what seems to be an apathy of action are beating the drums of end-of-world hopelessness.
As a result, a “tsunami” of children, some as young as 10, are being treated for crippling fears of environmental catastrophe, according to psychologists.
Recent bushfires in the Queensland rainforest and Amazon, plus attention-seeking stunts by groups such as Extinction Rebellion and apocalyptic omens from Swedish teen Greta Thunberg have only fuelled these fears.
Some children are even being given psychiatric drugs to help treat their eco-anxiety, according to the Climate Psychology Alliance.
As I watched wide-eyed adults, including former US president Barack Obama, hang on Thunberg’s every word last week, I wondered whether it was appropriate for grown ups to take their cues from a 16-year-old girl.
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Adults are seeking guidance from a child who has eco-anxiety over what she has been told by adults about what adults have partly done. I’m confused.
Australian child and adolescent psychologist Dr Michael Carr-Gregg, who told News Corp l he sees a child with eco-anxiety each week, exclaimed on Twitter: “I don’t see how scaring little children that the world is about to end is constructive or psychologically responsible.”
So how do we encourage our children to take an assertive not nihilistic attitude?
It is easy to be cynical about kids on climate marches, dismissing their passion as just a lazy desire to skip school. That patronising attitude grossly underestimates their ability to appreciate more than we give them credit for.
Telling children they should get rid of their phones and laptops seems similarly redundant. I’m banking on the kids on laptops to devise future technological advancements that help solve the repercussions of our consumption.
Banning climate change deniers the right to voice their opinions, like some sort of sociopathic silencer, as The Conversation has done, is also not the answer.
MORE FROM LUCY CARNE: Spare us this cringe-worthy sham protesting
If you still don’t believe in climate change, you’re a rapidly shrinking minority. In Australia, 77 per cent of the population now think it’s happening, according to the Climate of the Nation report 2019.
But treating climate change deniers as though they’re Voldemort _ he who cannot be named — is ridiculous. Stamping out freedom of speech only ignites hysteria.
And deliberately inciting fear in children is another form of manipulating silence.
It’s also bullying. Fear is an opinion, not a fact.
So buy your bloody keep cups, if that somehow alleviates your guilt, but it’s an empty gesture when it comes to reassuring kids’ fears.
I don’t pretend to know what is going on with climate change. I’ve read it about in newspapers, I’ve seen the David Attenborough docos and clicked on some websites that truly worried me.
I’m no scientist, but I am a grown up. And I know that doomsday fatalism is never useful.
“I want you to panic … I want you to feel the fear everyday,” Thunberg warned in a speech.
Children do not need to be terrified into the unrelenting horror that we are all going to die.
They need adults to reassure them with protection and attention, without manipulation.
Just as our brave teacher on school camp did when she stormed into the women’s toilets and bashed on the shower stall where this sinister man was lurking.
“Get out now, before I call the police,” she yelled.
The door opened and before us stood a soaking wet, confused female camper — with hairy legs.
MORE FROM LUCY CARNE: Never forget, people are kind
I guess this is also a story of the consequences of childhood hysteria actualised.
When it comes to allaying climate change anxiety, perhaps we need to support our kids to be engaged and active without despair.
But, more than anything, we need to encourage healthy realism.
Because the terrifying monster hiding behind the door isn’t always as scary as we fear it might be.
Lucy Carne is editor of RendezView
lucy.carne@news.com.au
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