When the children and Teenagers think about the future, they have an extra burden: They have to deal with more things than adults. An adult can look at the United Nations’ most recent climate report, models the long-term effects of unchecked global temperature increases, and assumes that they are gone long before the worst floods and firestorms occur. Of course, this misses the point that climate change is already killing people, and that we need immediate action to prevent it from getting worse.
Children today are facing another 70, 80, 90 years of these things.
Tara Crandon, a psychologist at the QIMR Berghofer Institute for Medical Research and the University of Queensland in Australia, hears these fears from her young patients. “Some young people I have met in practice are talking about not wanting to have children,” says Crandon. “Or ‘What is the meaning of life, when this is my future what will it be like?’ There doesn’t seem to be anything really done about climate change. I think that’s a huge contributing factor to the kind of anxiety we’re seeing with young people, because they’re looking so far ahead into their future, and through the lens of change. climate change, the future looks really bleak. “
Crandon wanted to learn about what effect this anxiety has on young people, so she co-authored paperwas published in January in the magazine Natural climate change, overarching factors such as where the child lives, their home life, and their school community. The team concluded that, by contrast, anxiety may actually be a Useful thing in the face of the climate crisis — at least when handled properly. In their paper, the researchers call climate anxiety “an adaptive response to a real threat, as well as a potential cause of decline.”
WIRED sat down with Crandon to talk about why that’s why children and teenagers are especially vulnerable to climate anxiety, and what parents and experts say Working with young people can do about that. (This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.)
WIRED: It would be nice to define climate anxiety and climate grief, two terms we’ve been hearing a lot lately. What’s the difference?
Tara Crandon: The really big difference between climate anxiety and climate grief is that grief is like a mourning response. It’s about longing and loss — things that have happened now or in the past that we’re losing. Meanwhile, anxiety is something more predictive of the future. And that can be a loss, but it’s also a fear, an anxiety, and a fear.
I have worked with a lot of young people and children in my practice and have started to see them actually coming and talking about this existential fear and anxiety about climate change. And I’m also starting to notice that some will respond in really different ways. For some young people, letting that worry push them to look for ways they can do something meaningful for themselves, for their values, for the planet — based on hope. and actually react in helpful ways. And then I also noticed that there are other young people who have become overwhelmed and frozen by the same anxiety. Maybe they feel more helpless, more desperate. That anxiety begins to prevent them from being able to live their lives meaningfully.
