Last month was the five-year anniversary of Hurricane Florence, a catastrophic storm that devastated my mother’s hometown of Wilmington in coastal North Carolina. My twins were two years old at the time. I remember watching the heavy rains and violent wind from the relative safety of our further-inland home in Durham, and how transfixed my children were by the stormy scenes unfolding outside our windows.
For me, the dark weather was also internal: I was beginning to start really paying attention to climate change and knew that superstorms like Florence would only become more common. Just weeks before the hurricane, we had buried my beloved grandmother in Wilmington; the cemetery where we held her funeral was badly damaged in the storm. A few weeks after that, the 2018 IPCC report was released, along with headlines stating in no uncertain terms that there were 12 years left to limit climate catastrophe. Those 12 years, I realized, were less than the length of my twins’ childhood.
In the months that followed, I fell into a dark hole of climate anxiety, grief, and dread.
I inhaled everything I could possibly learn about climate change, as if facts could offer some kind of armor against the pain of knowing that the children I’d just brought into the world would inherit a future marked by unimaginable loss. But climate awareness took a steep toll on my mental health. I didn’t know how to keep performing the expected norms of parenthood, with a heightened awareness of climate change that made every plastic toy, every disposable diaper, and gas-fueled family car ride feel excruciating. And I didn’t know how to talk about how I was feeling with others, afraid I’d be labeled overreactive: too sensitive, too dramatic, too extreme.
There’s been a significant shift in public awareness of the mental health impacts of climate change in the past five years, and growing acknowledgment that young people are increasingly struggling with painful climate emotions. But the impact of climate awareness on parents’ mental and emotional well-being is still often overlooked. More and more, parents are offered advice on how to manage the task of parenting in a changing climate, but what’s often missing from this advice is acknowledgment of how much pain many climate-aware parents are experiencing. When I went back to school to get my master’s degree in public health a couple of years ago, I knew I wanted to learn more about how concern about climate change affects parents’ mental health—and I focused my capstone research project on exactly this topic.
My research project was a literature review that summarized what’s currently known about how concern about climate change affects parents’ emotional well-being. And what I found in the academic literature were papers that painted a picture of parents experiencing deep emotional pain because of climate change—but also, papers that offered glimmers of insight about what helps some parents cope.
One of the key themes that emerged in my analysis was that many parents experience emotional distress around climate change that can be described as “moral injury.” Moral injury is the experience of psychological harm resulting from witnessing or engaging in actions that violate an individual’s core moral values or beliefs, or from betrayal by a trusted authority. In a landmark paper addressing the extraordinary burden of climate distress on youth mental health, researchers found that governments’ failure to protect young people from climate change constituted a form of moral injury.
Parents experience moral injury too, and for us, the moral wound may take unique forms. Parents are morally obligated to provide physical and emotional care and protection for their children; climate change directly interferes with these fundamental parental duties. Parents may worry they will be unable to protect their children from future harm from climate change and feel distressed at being unwillingly complicit in systems of harm, such as the fossil fuel infrastructure that makes everyday modern life possible. And many parents are distressed by the challenges of parenting in a changing climate, like having to navigate difficult conversations about climate change with children.
Although parents’ emotional experiences relating to climate concern are overwhelmingly described as painful in academic literature, for some parents, embracing the distressing reality of climate change may also be a catalyst for personal growth, meaning, hope, and solidarity. Parenthood is inherently transformative, but in the context of climate change, this transformation can take on different dimensions. The deep love parents feel for their children can be a powerful motivator for climate action and a call to love more deeply in the present. What seems key for the parents who are able to experience climate change as a catalyst for transformation—rather than solely a source of pain and distress—is the experience of embracing painful climate emotions, rather than trying to numb or run away from them. And for many, having a community of other climate-concerned parents can offer a powerful source of meaning and solidarity.
I still experience painful climate emotions on a regular basis. Like many people, I watched this past summer’s extreme weather unfold with a sense of dread: floods battered my new home state of Vermont, heat waves scorched millions across the country, wildfires devastated Hawai’i, and border-crossing smoke choked much of the east coast. But over time, I’ve gotten better at embracing my own painful climate emotions—and being a part of an engaged group of climate activists at Moms Clean Air Force helps me feel far less alone than I used to. I’m reminded every day of how many people care deeply about showing up for climate action on behalf of our children and future generations: those of us who care are more powerful in numbers than many of us realize.
The good news is that more and more research on how to help people cope with climate distress is emerging every day: we’re going to need all the resources and tools we can muster to navigate these rapidly-changing times. We’re going to need to learn how to help our children navigate uncharted climate territory with mental and emotional resilience. And as we learn, let’s not forget that parents’ mental and emotional health matters in a changing climate, too.
READ MY PUBLISHED RESEARCH FINDINGS HERE
TELL CONGRESS: SUPPORT YOUTH MENTAL HEALTH AND ACCESS TO CLIMATE EDUCATION