
“What’s in the Air” is a column by Dominique Browning, Moms Clean Air Force Co-Founder and Director, in which she explores life today through the lens of air quality and public health.
Much ink, as we used to say, is being spilled over the stress levels of parents these days; Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy has declared the problem to be an urgent public health issue. I’m with him. Many of my colleagues at Moms Clean Air Force are young parents, and they are contending with anxieties that I never had to deal with as a parent of two young sons. My oldest turns 40 this week; memories of his childhood, and that of his brother, and that of my young parent self, have been much on my mind.
Dr. Murthy writes in the New York Times:
“They [parents] are navigating traditional hardships of parenting—worrying about money and safety, struggling to get enough sleep—as well as new stressors, including omnipresent screens, a youth mental health crisis and widespread fear about the future.”
In my work with Moms—and moms—I’m daily aware of the biggest “stressor” though it seems weak to call it that, given how profound its impact: Fear. Fear of the future, the future the day brings, and the future of a lifetime.
Tell the House of Representatives: Protect Our Children From Extreme Weather
We generate a great deal of fear in gloom and doom messaging around global warming. And what is more terrifying than gun violence, especially at schools? These sources of fear are interconnected in surprising ways.
My “quant” friends, who steer by data, tell me that a parent’s fear of gun violence is misplaced, given the low odds of a school shooting in most people’s communities. I think they misunderstand or discount key things: one, the completely random nature of the violence and the unexpected places shootings happen—and their subsequent amplification on all media, across the country. This week we are all living with the unfathomable grief of parents who have lost children in Georgia. Appalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, feels close by—even if it is hundreds of miles away.
Then there is the profound impact on everyone’s psyche of active school shooter drills, those horrific but necessary exercises in lockdown that take place at just about every school nowadays. JD Vance refers to school shootings as “a fact of life.” The fact is, this fact of life is entirely preventable and created by people who have long-resisted commonsense gun safety laws. We are awash in military-grade munitions.
Schools are announcing bans on cell phones—but the first thing many parents think about is, How will my child call me if something awful is happening? How will I find my child? Two decades ago, it was unthinkable that work meetings would be interrupted because a colleague was getting “active shooter alerts” on her phone and she had to race to school to make sure her child was safe. Now, our little team at Moms Clean Air Force has been through this at least three or four times in recent memory.
Then there’s the fear that hangs over anyone paying attention to global warming. If ever there was science that was subject to doom-saying, it is climate science. We now read about how events are unfolding faster than predicted toward “tipping points” beyond which we do not return. It is super important for people to understand what is at stake—and who is at stake: our children.
Even in the last decade, all of us are feeling the impacts of the extreme weather that is supercharged by heating, itself supercharged by fossil fuel carbon and methane pollution. Phoenix, for instance, has seen a record number of uninterrupted days—over 100—of temperatures over 100 degrees F. Our Arizona organizer doesn’t leave the house without oven mitts to hold onto stair rails, and children can’t play outside. And again, because of how easy it is to follow temperature news in every corner of the globe, Phoenix feels as though it is next door to someone living in Maine, and Maine is suffering from its own tragic extreme weather events, like deadly ice storms, flooding, and its own unexpected extreme heat wave this June.
It is far more difficult to find information, daily, about what is going on across the country to solve the climate problem. Not because it isn’t there. But because it isn’t happening at a large enough scale—and because gloom has click bait appeal that promise does not. But there has to be a balance. Climate doom can lead quickly to despair and paralysis. So can the heavy gloom over the lack of significant progress on gun safety laws.
The capacity for empathy is a human gift, and something to cherish and cultivate. It can also feel like a curse—feeling the pain of others can make it difficult to navigate the day.
That’s why the capacity to take action, to demand change, to create change, is so very important. Despair can be paralyzing. Hope and optimism require active cultivation, but they fuel activism. What is truly impossible, what should be unthinkable, is to do nothing. To simply leave young parents to their own devices; to leave in place lawlessness when it comes to citizens buying assault weapons; lawlessness when it comes to stopping the carbon and methane pollution destabilizing our climate. Parents and children deserve far stronger protections against gun violence and climate disruption than those that currently exist.
Ann Patchett writes, in her novel Tom Lake, about a young woman who announces to her mother that she will never bear children, because of the perilous state of the planet. As her mother absorbs this news, she gazes out over her garden, watches the flit of periwinkle butterflies among the plants. And she comes to this realization:
“It’s not that I’m unaware of the suffering and the soon-to-be-more suffering in the world, it’s that I know the suffering exists beside wet grass and a bright blue sky recently scrubbed by rain. The beauty and the suffering are equally true.”
Equally true, indeed. But it would be fantastic to live in a country that tipped toward protecting more of that beauty and fighting against more that suffering.
Tell the House of Representatives: Protect Our Children From Extreme Weather