Stories are the heart of childhood: Cuddling up to read books, whispering family lore at bedtime, making playful tales up all day long. Now Too Small to Fail, the early childhood initiative of the Clinton Foundation, says stories are the key to driving increased action on the climate crisis. Storytelling is, the organization contends, a critical way for popular media to reframe the public narrative and present the tangible impacts of the climate emergency on children and families.
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At an event last month, Too Small to Fail released a resource for storytellers to help them think about climate stories—and expand how they’re thinking about the audiences they’re reaching. The report, Climate Change and Early Childhood: A Science Based Resource for Storytellers, was created in conjunction with Frameworks Institute and offers science-based information on how popular media can frame climate issues for the public, especially young children and caregivers.
Three panels consisting of members of the media, filmmakers, NGO heads, and philanthropists met to announce and discuss the new report, moderated by Hillary Clinton, Chelsea Clinton, and CNN Chief Climate Correspondent Bill Weir. It was a wide-ranging and thought-provoking conversation about the intersection of climate change and early childhood development. Panelists tossed around ideas about the role of popular media—from TikTok to television to graphic novels—in elevating compelling stories about young children and our changing climate. They concluded that storytelling can support young kids through this time of immense change—and anxiety.
Climate stories are especially important for children in communities of color and historically marginalized communities, the report notes, as they’re the most exposed and least resourced group grappling with the climate-created adversities. The report states, “Getting this information into stories can expand understanding of the ways that climate change is affecting human health and wellbeing and generate support of the solutions required to address and prevent the harm it is causing.”
Secretary Clinton said that the time to develop and share these stories is now: “Last year was the warmest on record. This is not a problem of the future.”
Here are four takeaways from Too Small to Fail’s event, the organization’s fourth convening on the topic of climate resilience and children’s healthy development.
1. Popular media can be used as a solution.
Too Small to Fail has successfully turned to Hollywood in the past for help encouraging early literacy by writing positive messaging into television shows like Orange Is the New Black, Parenthood, and Modern Family. With the Frameworks report, they hope to enlist the media again, this time about climate. The overarching idea is to get accurate, depoliticized climate information that can be acted on to as many people as possible through various media kids watch and interact with.
2. Stories about climate must be entertaining.
Messages about extreme heat and more, plus solutions, have to be fascinating. “The audience doesn’t give you a break because something is factual,” said screenwriter and director Scott Z. Burns, creator of the Apple TV+ series Extrapolations and a producer for the documentary An Inconvenient Truth. “No one wants to just watch about climate,” he added. Climate storylines suffer if they’re too obvious. A kids cooking show that panelist Sabrina McCormick, a social scientist and filmmaker, is currently working on through Resilience Creative, her organization, is about caregivers and kids making food together. The food just happens to be eco-friendly, so the message is baked in with the fun, but “we don’t say climate,” she said.
3. Collaboration with artists makes a difference.
“Advocates are good at factual but less good at the emotional,” said Ai-Jen Poo, President of the National Domestic Workers Alliance. Multiple panelists agreed with this assessment, stating that artists, including writers, filmmakers, and content creators, are necessary to help drive emotional change and public conversation. Stories have a unique way of opening people up to new ideas, and art can change minds. Panelists exchanged ideas about ways to forge relationships between scientists and writers and to help climate narratives take seed in writers’ rooms for projects. They also called on Hollywood studio heads to greenlight more climate narratives as movies have a proven track record of being able to shift mass cultural narratives, big and small. Heather Fipps, co-founder of Hollywood Climate Summit, used the movie Wild as an example; people went hiking in droves after watching it.
4. Educating kids through storytelling can influence parents.
“Our kids’ lives will be shaped by climate instability,” said Laura Schifter, founder of This Is Planet Ed, an initiative to unlock the power of education as a force for climate action. And yet, she says, kids are confused about climate, which makes it hard for them to act on solutions. They need more climate education. As an added benefit, when kids are taught about climate through popular media, parents also learn. Schifter cited a study showing fathers learn most about climate from their daughters, especially in conservative families. She concluded, “Science is about solutions, not just problems. Adults need to kidify it.”
With this new Too Small to Fail report, storytelling adults now have a useful roadmap to help kidify the climate crisis.
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