Every day, I hear from parents who tell me they’re worried about climate change. Climate change is affecting our lives as parents now: we worry about keeping our kids safe from troubling wildfire smoke and scary insect-borne illnesses; we worry about if and how to navigate climate conversations with children young enough to still believe in the tooth fairy. Climate change also profoundly impacts how parents think and feel about the future. Research shows that many parents are worried about how a rapidly heating world will affect their children in coming decades—one study exploring eco-reproductive concerns found that 96.5% of surveyed parents and potential parents reported an “overwhelmingly negative” expectation of a climate-changed future.
TELL CONGRESS: SUPPORT MENTAL WELLNESS RESOURCES FOR COMMUNITIES HIT BY CLIMATE DISASTER
As the mother of eight-year-old twins, I share these worries. Loving small humans who will live into a future that is frightening to fully imagine takes tremendous courage. Yesterday, my son asked me how old he would be in 2050; it was a matter of simple math to tell him the answer.
But what about grandparents? Despite the recent explosion of research on climate change and youth mental health, and a smaller but notable increase in attention on climate change and parents’ well-being, there has been very little public or academic consideration of the emotional experience of climate change for grandparents. Yet grandparents are also deeply emotionally invested in children who will grow into adulthood in an uncertain future, and they face unique climate challenges as older adults—grandparents’ mental health in a changing climate is worthy of attention too.
Extreme weather and older adults’ mental health
To better understand how grandparents are experiencing the stress of climate change, I spoke with my colleague Hazel Chandler, a great-grandmother who also happens to be Moms Clean Air Force’s Arizona Field Organizer. When asked about how climate change impacts grandparents’ mental health, Hazel immediately described the punishing toll of extreme heat: “For older people, keeping active is incredibly important for both physical and mental health, and being able to do that with the heat is extremely difficult. Finding a time to get out and walk is virtually impossible.” She also described how dangerous it can be for older adults to fall on scorching sidewalks, and the stresses of having to go outside to attend numerous medical appointments during extreme heat (Phoenix, where Hazel lives, recently experienced a record-breaking 100 days in a row of temperatures over 100 degrees). The isolation imposed by extreme weather, Hazel told me, can been deeply painful for older adults.
Grandparents and climate anxiety
In addition to the burden of navigating extreme weather as an older adult, grandparents may also have unique experiences of climate anxiety—a term that has come to describe feelings of emotional distress about how climate change is unraveling the world as we know it and expected it to be. Dr. Robin Cooper, a clinical psychiatrist and co-founder of the Climate Psychiatry Alliance, told me about her experience of climate distress:
“When my daughter was pregnant with her first child, I had a lot of anxiety that I didn’t have [during my own pregnancy]. I had dreams about not being able to protect those that I loved. To this day, my grandchildren are in a part of my brain that has a tight compartment around it… It is really, really hard for me, and I think for everyone, to truly imagine a world in a way that is not one that we’ve known before, to think about the future. I can’t imagine it, and I don’t want to imagine it when it comes to my own grandchildren.”
Dominique Browning, Director and Co-Founder of Moms Clean Air Force, shared similar sentiments:
“For this grandmother, it is the anxiety of what is to come that keeps me up. Having steered my sons to somewhat safe, stable berths and long ago handed them over to their own piloting, their own decisions, I’m done with that part of mothering. But grandmothering. Wow. I could not have predicted how hard it would hit me, falling in love all over again with a tiny one. It has opened up an entirely new chapter in the book of anxiety—and the book of devoted and protective activism—that seems to have become one of my life’s works.”
Elderhood, climate activism, and legacy
When it comes to devoted and protective climate activism, grandparents are increasingly a force to be reckoned with, as evidenced by the emergence of older adult-focused groups like Elders Climate Action, Third Act, and 1000 Grandmothers. Many of Moms Clean Air Force’s most active members are grandparents too. Though older adults’ experiences are heavily influenced by socioeconomic privilege, many grandparents have more time and resources than parents of young children to contribute to climate activism. They have the capacity for emotional resilience that comes from having lived through a lifetime of challenges; they bring perspective earned with time. “Experienced Americans,” as Third Act describes its membership, are the fastest-growing age demographic in the U.S.—and they are a critical demographic when it comes to leveraging the political power needed to push for systemic climate action.
Grandparents may also be at a stage in their lives where they are reflecting in new ways about what’s meaningful in life and what kind of legacy they want to leave: “For me and for other climate activists in this realm,” Dr. Cooper told me, “being an elder brings an extraordinary sense of meaning and purpose to the challenges of our world and the challenges of our developmental state. We’re reflecting on the legacy that we leave behind, on the value and purpose of our lives.” For grandparents and for all of us, reflecting on meaning, purpose, and legacy can be a powerful way to cope with difficult climate emotions.
My twins will be 34 in 2050; I don’t know yet if I’ll ever have the privilege of being a grandmother myself. But whether or not my future holds grandmotherhood, I know I will carry inspiration from the fierce grandparent activists I’ve been lucky enough to work with for decades to come. I hope that the future will bring more attention to the mental health of climate change on all generations—and to the unique ways that each generation can be part of climate solutions.
Learn more about Moms’ work on mental health.
TELL CONGRESS: SUPPORT MENTAL WELLNESS RESOURCES FOR COMMUNITIES HIT BY CLIMATE DISASTER