Parenting in Climate Change

As parents facing climate change, we are caught in wanting to offer everything we can to provide the best future for our children and beyond, while knowing that the world we are passing on to them is far from this.

This morning I dropped my daughter off at a camp she has been doing every summer. On the way, I was explaining to her the haze in the air is from wildfires again, that the air is not healthy to breathe, and that it never used to be this way. I gave her a sense of when the air will clear and we sent a hope for rains to put out the fires.

I was recalling that it was not that long ago that my son asked me a question he heard from the children at this same camp: will the earth die in 20 years? I remember speaking with him about the fear that many people have about the impacts of harming the world, that the earth is resilient, and what people can do to work towards healing with the earth.

It is wild to see the world change in such a short period of time. It raises pain and fear for me as well as reinvigorating my need as a parent to act on behalf of coming generations.

The ways children are experiencing and witnessing the impacts of climate change carry with them seeds for the future. I speak with parents who intentionally plant hope while opening layers of the suffering of this world.

We are living at a crux in time, where the oppressive ways we have lived by are rampaging, and an alternative narrative of a life sustaining world is surfacing. How might we as a generation of parents come together from the depths of our care and hold the earth, the stories, suffering and hope, and open possibilities for our children to enter into? #parentingwithpurpose #climatechange #ecotherapyinpractice #clinicalsupervision