Kids Need to Know...
That humans take care of the earth. A clear-eyed but hopeful conversation about climate change, kids, and the future.
Hi, Aunties. Thanks for opening today’s post even though it’s about a challenging topic. I’m so glad you’re here.
Climate change isn’t my area of expertise, but is sure does scare me and it sure does make me mad. As someone who loves the kids in my life very much and worries about their future — indeed, as someone who cares about kids everywhere — I jumped at the opportunity to talk with Anya Kamenetz, author of the excellent twice-weekly newsletter, The Golden Hour. Anya is a journalist who’s been covering climate change, social movements, mental health, education, and parenting for two decades,1 and her deep dives into working with climate emotions — particularly with kids — have been incredibly grounding and helpful for me.
In a post following the historic Held v. State of Montana verdict, Anya wrote about the young people out there fighting for climate justice — including the undue burdens sometimes placed upon them. She wrote:
I am, basically, as a writer, an advocate and a mother, trying to wrap my life around the motto that climate change is a generational justice issue. Meaning that it affects people worse the later they are born. Meaning that elders especially owe it to the young to address it.
Older people are more likely to treat younger people with sentimentality than empathy, and to speak for them rather than listen to them. Generational justice means recognizing young people’s rights as well as our responsibilities toward them.
I know there are many young people, including children, who are true climate leaders and their voices deserve to be heard.
But it’s not fair to put the pain of our most vulnerable people on display just to get the rest of us to pay attention to what we damn well ought to know is an emergency. We ought to let them be children, let them go to school and play, while we adults take care of the hard work of building a better future.
So how do we undertake the hard work of building a better for future for all the world’s children? Anya and I had a conversation about it, which she and I are both posting at our newsletters this week.
We’re also running a shared subscription promo: buy one, get one free. Upgrade to an annual (not monthly) paid subscription to The Auntie Bulletin and receive a 12-month subscription to Anya’s newsletter, The Golden Hour, for free!
Now Let’s Get to It
Anya: How do you describe The Auntie Bulletin to people who don't know about it?
Lisa: When I started off, I thought I was writing specifically for people who don't have kids but are significantly involved in helping to raise other people's children. Over the past few months, I've realized I have a broader mission around supporting people to build kinship ties – ties that are intergenerational and purposely interrupting the structures that wall us off from each other. That includes the nuclear family, but also class barriers and language barriers and ethnicity barriers. It’s really about building community with all of our neighbors, not just the neighbors that look like us and seem like us.
The Auntie stance feels helpful for that, simply because kids are very easy to love. It’s a way into conversations about our responsibility to people who aren't within our immediate circle, family or community. If we have a responsibility to other people's children, then maybe we also have a responsibility to other people's parents and other people's neighbors and other people's extended communities. I want to ask, what are our responsibilities to other people's people?
Anya: I love that, and I think it's a very solid position to be in, where it doesn't have to be a partisan project to be political, though there's something very, very political in a deep way within it.
Lisa: This is a message that I want people to hear – readers of the Auntie Bulletin, readers of the Golden Hour – that maybe there's an opportunity when we think in terms of building relationships with other people's children. People across ideological lines might be able to say, “yeah, we care about kids” without immediately starting to fight. Focusing on kids may be an opportunity to establish shared terrain – which can be harder to do if you start the conversation from race, or from climate justice, or from other lenses that are instantly politicized.
Anya: At The Golden Hour, I have been trying to talk about the climate crisis and the polycrisis from the perspective of people wanting to be happy. It gets so big and so overwhelming that we're all shut down. There's denial, there’s paralysis. But when you flip it and ask, “How can I be more happy?” – well, one way you can be more happy is to be in touch with reality and be in touch with your feelings. Then it becomes a totally different project.
That’s like the inverse of what you're doing, because the world is very big. So we have to ask, “what is my little piece of it?” Which brings me to, “What does my household look like? How am I parenting?” I started by invoking the planetary level crisis, but it starts with going next door and talking to your neighbors.
Lisa: I really appreciate your point that we’re really thinking about the same work, just on different scales. It makes me think of adrienne maree brown’s metaphor of fractals in activism and movement work. There are repeating patterns at the microscopic level and at the macroscopic level, but they’re the same patterns. If you can get the micro level of your immediate neighbors and get those relations right, and then just replicate that on a global scale, then we're good.
Anya: I had a chance to interview [youth climate activist] Xiye Bastida when she was like 17. Her father's Otomi Toltec, so Mexican Indigenous, and she said he always tells her, “How can you save the world if you can't clean up your room?” She said, we make altars and we make seasonal offerings, and in our symbolic way, we're trying to heal the earth with our offerings and with the way we lay out the altar. There's a symmetry, and we're acknowledging the directions and the water. And all of this was a practice for generations, where you just get in alignment. And that's how you fix things. Starting from that very small and concrete level of table setting, and bringing people together around the ritual.
I think about it all the time, because in the Jewish tradition, the home is the woman's spiritual domain, traditionally. But the table is the altar, and the ceremony that you're in charge of is that table, which includes the people you gather together.
Lisa: I love that, and it’s making me think about something I heard on the All My Relations podcast. It's hosted by two awesome Indigenous women, Adrienne Keene and Matika Wilbur, who are both probably in their 30s. There was an episode about food sovereignty where Matika Wilbur was talking about going home after a year or more on the road doing a photography book (Project 562: Changing the Way We See Native America), and finally being able to eat her Native foods. An elder told her something like, “your work is to set the table for people, so the question is, who are you feeding?”
I think the question, “Who are you feeding?” is so material for Aunties and anyone who chooses to care for people outside their own household. Because we are regularly, literally preparing snacks and meals for people, but in a way that disrupts the ruts our society has gotten into in terms of who provides care.
Anya: Oh, my gosh, I love that! It reminds me of how, for several years, we had a little summer group of families that would get some beach houses together and the kids would roam around. It was this totally idyllic scenario. You remember that line from George W. Bush, “we know it’s hard to put food on your family”? We’d joke, who’s putting food on the children? Whichever children, whichever house, throw some food on them!
That week or two of the summer was the time when we were living out our fantasy. It’s so hard to do in the city, and so hard to do with people's jobs – but that's the dream. That's what people want.
Lisa: Totally! It's so healing to even be in that space for a short period of time. It makes my heart sing to imagine getting to live like that all the time. Which I do, to a certain extent.
Anya: I'd love to hear more about your co-housing setup.
Lisa: Oh sure, so we have three households in two houses next door to each other. My partner and I live next door to one of my good friends from growing up and his partner and their kids, and then they have a basement apartment where another household is located, which is also in our community. It’s a delight. We have a shared backyard. We have meals together four nights a week. Kids are in and out of my house often.
The one thing that feels like it’s missing to me is actually more families, more kids. We only have two kids in the community, but I think what ends up being best for parents with young kids and for the kids themselves is having multiple families, like you were describing on your vacations, where the kids can just swirl around in a pack together, and whoever runs into them when they're hungry, we'll put some food on them!
Anya: That's the situation I'm always seeking out. We have two kids and quite a nice block here in Brooklyn. We have a Whatsapp group. There's kids on the block, and there's kids at the park at the end of the block. It's great. It’s not the full meld, but proximity gets you a long way and walkability gets you a long way. I'm realizing as I talk to you that every vacation, every time I get a chance, I'm always trying to recreate that. Like, who can we invite?
My sister lives on some land in Mississippi, which is partly a climate refuge from where we grew up, in New Orleans. They bought it with that in mind, but also hoping to have intentional community there. And it's been hard to get people in on that level, especially with young kids to raise. That's been an ongoing tough thing for them to manage.
Lisa: Yeah, I'm not surprised to hear that. The structures of our society are antithetical to building communities. You have to really work against the way that the infrastructure and policies are set up. Just at the level of housing policy and housing affordability – those are huge barriers.
Anya: So let’s jump to the connections between a child-centric worldview and the climate.
Lisa: Let’s do! Can you kick us off and tell us how you came to the work you’re doing now?
Anya: I started as an education reporter with a youth justice focus. My first book was Generation Debt, about the economic headwinds that the millennials were facing at the time, and what it meant to be the first generation that was not going to have more economic stability than our parents had. So youth justice ended up being my jam. I wrote about education from a student-centered perspective, and then, as I had my own kids, I started thinking not just about education, but about how our life is set up or not set up to protect children. Climate disaster was something that I experienced as a person growing up in the Gulf South, in Cancer Alley, in the path of hurricanes. When Katrina happened, I was there two weeks later with my family. I reported on the aftermath. I got married there the next year, and my bridal party gutted a house as part of our bridal week.
Lisa: That is amazing.
Anya: But I still felt like, “I don't have a place in this movement,” because I built a career doing totally different things. It was just in the last couple of years, through the pandemic, that my climate justice work started to come into focus. There was this 2021 Lancet study by Eric Lewandowski, who did a massive survey of 10,000 young people, and 75% of them said, “the future is frightening because of climate change.” That was the study that got me to say, “I care about youth well-being, and youth well-being is a climate issue and climate change is a youth well-being issue. Therefore, here's my place.”
It also came from my own parenting experiences, having kids who were becoming aware of what's happening – my 3 year old saying, “why was there no snow this year?”
Lisa: And then I’d love to hear you talk about why adults who care about kids need to take climate disaster seriously.
Anya: Actually, we know that they already do. Parents care more about climate change than non-parents. Mothers care more about climate change. A recent Stanford survey of families showed that 61% of parents with kids under 6 have been through an extreme weather event in the last two years. So it’s not just in kids’ lifetimes in the future, it’s right now. And it's not just our kids, it's all the world's kids.
Children, i.e., the adults of the future, are disproportionately distributed in the global South, and they are disproportionately facing catastrophic climate risk. They are in sub-Saharan Africa. They are in Southeast Asia. And they are living through climate disasters right now. Those disasters are traumatic and displacing, and they're interfering with their education and they're interfering with their health. They're interfering with their thriving. Children around the world today are the adults of tomorrow, the people who will be hopefully coming up with the interventions that will make our lives better and healthier when we are in our 80s being trundled around by the AI bots or whatever.
So it’s enlightened self-interest, but also part of being a good parent today, part of being a person who cares about children, is being conscious of climate. Lise Van Susteren, who's an important figure in the climate psychology world, draws an analogy to mandatory reporter status. She says, if you're a therapist or someone who works with children and there's a clear and present threat, you have to violate confidentiality and you have to report it to the authorities. Well, this is a clear and present threat to every child, so if you see it, you have to raise the alarm.
Lisa: Wow. That is such a good argument. That is so compelling.
Anya: I mean, we do need to preserve our peace. One of the great joys of spending time with children is you must be in the moment. You must have joy. You must be present with things as they're happening. I find time with children to be a huge refuge. But at the same time, we have to be mindful of what's happening in the world. We have to be a sort of semi-permeable membrane so that they get enough to know what's happening, but without it being so distressing.
When I work with parents, with caregivers, with educators, it’s clear we need to do our work on our feelings and our knowledge of the world, so then we can present to kids the right amount and perspective. We have to not be totally sealed off. Even babies get your stress. They get your anxiety. So you have to be able to discuss it, whatever it is. That's part of parenting through all of this. But so is being the safe landing place and maintaining the routines and all the things that we do with kids.
Lisa: That's such a good segue to the next thing we planned to talk about. What do you advise adults to say to kids about climate catastrophe and the polycrisis? No biggie.
Anya: Yeah, I mean, it sounds insane when you put it that way. I often quote Megan Bang, who is an educator of educators and Indigenous Ojibwe. She told me in an interview that kindergartners are coming to school with the perspective that humans ruined the earth and the earth is dying. So kindergartners and younger children need to experience the opposite, which is that humans are part of the earth, and humans take care of the earth.
That's not only talking; that's like, what do we do? How do we experience taking care of the earth? Well, we experience taking care of the signs of nature around us. You can be in a city, you can be in a rural area, but there's something alive around you that you could be a part of helping, whether that's like “we don't break branches off the tree,” or we can feed the birds at the park. It’s about being alive and awake and aware to the signs of nature.
Children have so much innate biophilia. I talked to a daycare owner in Dallas who said that, of her own accord, she's been helping her teachers experience nature. She took them all to a state park to experience nature, and she wants to bring that back home because she has kids at her daycare who, at one year old, they've never stood on grass. They live in the middle of the city, their parents work very long hours, they don't have access to a lot of green space. And maybe the parents worry about safety, they worry about bugs, they worry about the humidity, the heat.
So that's one thing – providing kids with the connection and experience of themselves as caregivers. And then the basic message is always kind of the same routine. “Something is happening, and we have a plan. The threat is this, we’re doing this. I’m going to do everything I can to keep you safe.”
We can do things to calm our bodies. We can do things to forget about what's happening for a little while. We can also learn more together if you have questions. We're going to look for the helpers. We're going to be a helper.
Lisa: I love your suggestion to position kids as people who are stewards of the environment and who are actively intervening to care for our environment and our communities. Where I live in the Pacific Northwest region of the U.S., we haven't yet had fires burning directly in urban communities, but we are very impacted by smoke in the summer, and by air quality issues. It’s become a huge issue for the whole West Coast and Mountain West, so kids are super aware of it. They can’t not be.
So what are the practicalities that we can be messaging to kids about? Maybe it’s thinking about how we use water. Or, are we going to take the bus or are we going to drive a car? And why did I buy an electric car? And also having them participate in making decisions, like “What do you think? Should we buy the compostable plates or should we buy the plastic plates for our party? Here we are at the store. What do you think we should do?” Just involving them in those decisions. Maybe even thinking about, “Well, the compostable plates cost more money. Do you think we should still get them?” So it’s about helping them to start embodying that logic of somebody who is participating as a steward in their communities.
I'm sure you're aware of Our Children’s Trust and the kids who've been suing states and the federal government for their right to live in a clean environment. That's an organization I'd like both of our newsletters’ readers to know about. Readers, check them out! They’re a great org to support financially.
Anya: Yeah, they’re great. Although there's always a tension, in the circles that I run in, between empowering kids with agency and looking to them as saviors or lifting them up as the hope.
Lisa: Oh interesting, I hadn’t thought about that.2
Anya: I do a lot of work in conversation with mothers’ movements, parents’ movements, where we say, “We want to share that burden and share that responsibility.” That's the spirit of care.
There was actually a paper in Nature magazine recently that looked at the parents’ climate movement and talked about substituting climate justice for a care ethic. The climate justice perspective is really about pushing against the powers that be for recognition. But the care ethic is about calling everyone in and saying, “This is our future, and everybody has a stake in that future.” Which I love.
This is often framed as a dilemma about, “Should I have kids? Should I not have kids because of the climate crisis?” I’m like, you can skip having kids; if that's the right answer for you, totally do it. But it doesn't get you off the hook for being engaged in the future. If you thought that not having kids would exempt you from worrying about climate change, it won't do that.
Lisa: I'm so glad you brought up this topic, because I’ve been wanting to figure out how to write about this ever since JD Vance said that childless cat ladies have no stake in the future. That was such a moment for childless women in the United States – and around the world – to both claim our identity and push back against the dominant narrative about us, right? The argument that people without children have no stake in the future to me was just so absurd. It felt so ridiculous.
There certainly are a lot of people who have chosen not to have children for climate reasons. And I think a lot of those people are doing it because they have a stake in the future. Maybe they want to focus their energies on advocacy and organizing and movement building around climate justice. Maybe they want to not contribute more carbon emissions, because having a kid is the biggest carbon impact that you can have.
Which is not a judgment on parents at all. I think this sometimes gets set up as a rivalry or face-off – like, you're a bad person for climate reasons if you have kids, or you're a bad person if you don't have kids because you don’t have a stake in the future. It can get set up as an antagonism, which I think is really, really wrong.
I just think for myself as an Auntie, and for a lot of other people who have embraced or want to embrace a life and practice of care, this choice is absolutely about the future. It’s about making a future that doesn't suck, and having as much capacity as possible to work toward that.
Anya: And it's part of our evolutionary superpowers, this concept of allomothering. We became who we are because of grandmothers and other folks who are willing to pour themselves into the work of care.
Lisa: I think people who buy into a really individualist model of family, they can maybe care about the needs of their own children and grandchildren, but their great grandchildren start to get abstract – not to mention their great great grandchildren, and their great great great grandchildren. It’s hard to be a good ancestor to seven generations down the line, or twenty generations, or fifty, because the farther out we get, the more those start to feel like other people’s children, and therefore not my problem.
But when you cultivate a daily practice of caring for other people's children, I think that actually makes it easier for you to give a sh** about the children who will be alive in 200 years or 1000 years.
Anya: I'd love to hear your thoughts about community resilience-building through kinship and other forms of collectivism. How have you seen that play out? How do you think it might work?
Lisa: I’ve become a real criticizer of the nuclear family model that we've all had imposed on us over the last few generations. I’ve written that if humans have been around for 300,000 years, that's like 2000 generations, and for only 2 or 3 generations in human history have we been doing this nuclear family thing. We are not wired for it, and it’s not good for us.
I’m thinking about forests, where the mycelium or fungus life is all interconnected under the ground, and it’s sending messages between the trees, and the trees’ roots are all interlocked. In the forest, it’s really hard to knock a tree down, let alone a lot of them. Even when a tree does come down, it sends its nutrients through the mycelium network out to the other trees, and it becomes a nurse log that supports the other species in the forest. The whole forest is locked together through the root systems of all the different plants, not to mention the branches overhead, and it’s all networked under the ground via fungus. That is so much harder to knock down than, like, a little stand of four trees surrounded by manicured grass in a park.
I think that that's what we need to be building – massive forests of humans who recognize how truly interdependent we are, and actively work to interlock with one another – and not just with our little groups that seem to be like us.
Where I live in Seattle, speaking of climate disaster, we are due for this huge Cascadia earthquake that’s forecast to potentially do massive damage and have massive casualties. When that time comes, we're going to need to be able to come together with all of our neighbors, not just the ones who look like us and are in our same social class.
I think that building a whole forest-worth of kinship starts with learning how to build just one kinship relationship with somebody who is not actually in your family. It’s hard, scary, and vulnerable to be like, “Will you be in my family? Can I be in your family?” “Will you really let me pick your kids up from school one day a week and take care of them? I really do want to do that.” Or, “Can I really ask you to go grocery shopping for me? Is that a thing we can ask of each other?”
We need to cultivate the courage to do that, and the stamina, and get to feel in our bodies the actual joy and liberation of it, because it feels so much better than the way that we normally live. And as we practice this with our loved ones, maybe it gets easier to be like, okay, actually, I can have that same kind of conversation with my older Vietnamese neighbors across the street. I've heard this disposition described as “civic courage.”
Anya: It does take courage, because you're violating social norms.
Lisa: Right? And you’re being really vulnerable.
Anya: And it happens in the doing. I'm from New Orleans, and New Orleans builds this muscle through celebration. My parents know all of their neighbors because of the multiple occasions in the year where they get dressed up in costumes and go outside and drink together in the street. It really works. The famous New Orleans second lines were originally jazz funerals. There were these groups called Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs, which were burial societies of mostly Black men. And then the funerals became the party. When you come together in a time of need, but you also make it a time of celebration, that's how you draw more people to the party.
Neighborhood Whatsapp groups like mine are great, but where I live, we started it with a block party. It's celebration that gets you together to build the muscle for the tough parts.
Lisa: I think we both responded to Ryan Rose Weaver’s recent post on Substack about this exact thing. Movement building needs to be joyful and actually attractive.
We're living through such a dark and scary and infuriating time. And yet I find myself feeling hopeful at the amount of energy and momentum I'm experiencing in my communities. People are incredibly fired up to organize, to build a strong, strong movement and be serious about it this time. It’s a weird emotional roller coaster: things are so messed up, and feeling those feelings, but then also feeling this real excitement and optimism and hope about the things that are happening. You’ve been writing about this so well in your “What really happened last week?” roundups – which I'm just loving, by the way.
That feeling of excitement and momentum and nourishment is so addictive. It's like, the more you get it, the more you want it, and the more you want it, the more you seek it out. And suddenly there’s actual momentum building around movement work and community building – which ultimately can be the same thing.
Anya: I'm with you. I think it's an incredible wisdom that we're tapping into collectively, which is the need to really make our efforts sustainable and joyful for the long haul. It's sinking in for me that this is probably going to be the next 4, 5, 6 years of my life, if not more, trying to get America away from authoritarianism. It's very important, and we’re dealing with climate collapse at the same time. While throwing a party may seem like an illogical response, it’s actually, I think, kind of spot on.
Lisa: Absolutely. In fact, I think it might be the only thing that's going to work. This is making me think about Erica Chenoweth’s research showing that nonviolent revolutions, empirically, are far more successful than violent revolutions. They’ve argued that nonviolent resistance works because it’s a lot easier and safer to join than a violent resistance – and even, potentially, fun. They talk about when all your neighbors are marching past your window banging on pots and pans and making a joyful noise to overthrow the dictator, you want to grab your own pots and pans and get out there and join them.
If You Appreciated This Conversation…
Check out more from Anya’s archives. Below, I’ve linked some posts I appreciate and think you might, too.
Also, don’t forget about our buy one, get one free subscription promo. Upgrade to an annual (not monthly) paid subscription to The Auntie Bulletin and receive a 12-month subscription to Anya’s newsletter, The Golden Hour, for free!
Here are some Golden Hour posts to check out:
Laughing at Climate Change (includes a video of one of the best comedy bits I’ve ever seen, from the great Hannah Einbender).
Climate Change is An Unspoken Reason Parents Are So Stressed
What I Shared With Doctors Picking Up The Pieces From Hurricane Helene
Coming Attractions
In Monday’s Kinship Snacks for paid subscribers, I’ll be writing about how to introvert while chronically ill and on vacation with children. I just got back from a three-week, two stage trip that included lots of time with friends and friends’ children — including multiple kids with special needs. I’m not going to lie: I’m wiped. But I had a lovely time and I made it through with enough energy remaining in the tank to hang with kids this afternoon and bring you this post this week! My fellow chronically ill and disabled Aunties know that’s a huge win. I’ll share how I did it.
Other upcoming how-tos:
How to hold a newborn baby (simple yet profound! postponed yet not forgotten!)
How to befriend your elders (we’re branching out! kinship is intergenerational!)
How to intervene when kids fight
For the Love for Our (Childless) Elders: Auntie Collective Survey
I’m planning a post about loving and caring for our elders as we ought. What would it look and feel like for all of us, regardless of whether we have children, to be supported by intergenerational communities of care from late career to retirement to true old age?
The responses I’ve received so far are gold. I’m so excited to share our Auntie Collective wisdom with you.
Be warned, the four main questions in this survey are open-ended, so they’ll take a little more thought and time. Feel free to think broadly and creatively, answer expansively, and answer the questions you wish you’d been asked rather than the ones I actually asked you.
Last chance! Click below to share your perspective – and be entered to win a 12-month paid-tier subscription to The Auntie Bulletin!
As part of her NPR podcast Life Kit: Parenting, Anya got to star in a video with Cookie Monster and I just can’t even. I think I could play it cool with most celebrities but with Cookie Monster? I would be fangirling so hard.
I have thought about it now — thanks to the above conversation with Anya, as well as her excellent post which I quoted from up top, “What We Make Children Stand For.”
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What an incredible conversation! Thank you both for the generosity of your brilliance and all these amazing recourses.
This is beautiful! I'm definitely going to keep thinking about many parts of your conversation, especially "I think that that's what we need to be building – massive forests of humans who recognize how truly interdependent we are, and actively work to interlock with one another – and not just with our little groups that seem to be like us."