Session 6: How can we support parents and early years providers in advocating for a sustainable future?
Capita and This is Planet Ed (the Aspen Institute) have co-convened the Early Years Climate Action Task Force to draft the first-ever U.S. Early Years Climate Action Plan. The plan recommends ways the country can help young children, ages 0 to 8, flourish in the face of climate change.
Climate change is a direct threat to our children’s health, safety, and ability to flourish. Yet experts in child development and climate have been slow to join forces to address this crisis. We are proud to bring together experts from both worlds to share, learn, and unite their efforts.
This final listening session explored ways to help parents and early years providers advocate for a sustainable future.
The experts:
Chelsea Clinton, Clinton Foundation
Anya Kamenetz, Aspen Institute
Lois Martin, Community Day Center for Children
Shaina Oliver, Moms Clean Air Force
Child care centers need more resources to implement strategies for climate mitigation and adaptation
Lois Martin described the impacts that climate change is having on the early child care facility she directs in Seattle, noting the effects of wildfire smoke and heat. Staff have to keep children inside when the temperature rises and the facility had to close for days during a record-level heatwave. The closure kept children away from the center’s “loving, nurturing environment” and forced their parents to miss work. When workers can’t get to their jobs, the entire community suffers.
Panelists called for policies and resources, including grants, to protect early learners by improving child care facilities, in particular by helping providers convert to clean energy (which will improve air quality indoors and outside) and offering access to shade. Martin also stressed the many benefits of “retaining and enhancing our urban tree canopy”: shade on increasingly warm days, and improved air quality, beauty, and habitat for the wildlife that “keeps our children curious.” More broadly, she called for providing every child access to outdoor space, including street trees and pocket parks.
A task force member described steps in this direction in California, including providing $30 million in early childhood funding designated for urban greening and planting trees and hiring a climate consultant to develop webinars on making facilities greener.
Climate change has inequitable impacts that we must consider as we develop and implement solutions
Panelists highlighted the inequitable impacts of climate change and other environmental harms on marginalized communities, indigenous people, Black and brown people, and women. Martin noted that children of color are more likely to grow up in heat islands. Oliver described how indigenous communities are often food deserts or near industrial areas and highways with high diesel traffic. Panelists discussed the disproportionate impact of climate change on women and girls and the need to navigate this gender inequity.
They also discussed a range of solutions. Martin called for “equitable investment” and for partnering with groups like Moms Rising or the National Association for the Education of Young Children to build advocacy platforms for environmental justice for children. Oliver cited the need to provide funding for tribal communities and to “invite Black, brown, and indigenous educators to the table” to help reshape education and move toward more sustainable communities. Kamenetz advocated for “making sure that women and those of all gender identities have access to resources that meet their needs and recognize their particular vulnerabilities.” She also pointed to some smaller, simple strategies, such as providing child care when planning a protest or action.
We need solidarity across generations. We must consider future generations and look to past generations for wisdom
Panelists stressed the need to advocate not only for the children of today, but also for the children who will follow them: “speaking up for future generations, the unborn, for those generations that don’t have a voice right now,” in Oliver’s words. Clinton, who joined the session to give a closing statement, described her organization’s work “to help parents and caregivers be effective first teachers for their children, for their grandchildren, for their younger siblings, for their nieces and their nephews.”
We must also look back to the generations that came before us. Oliver stressed the importance of bringing indigenous knowledge back to communities, for instance by restoring knowledge of how to grow food, which could in turn help restore communities’ food sovereignty.
We must recognize the ecoanxiety of caregivers and help them cope
As Kamenetz said, “It’s a uniquely anxious time to become a parent.” She discussed the growing recognition among psychologists and others of anxiety linked to climate change. This anxiety comes from experiencing the effects of climate change. It is also tied to consuming news about it. Seventy-five percent of Generation Z experiences negative mental health impacts (including anxiety and depression) because they feel overwhelmed by this news. Kamenetz also described research showing that ecoanxiety is a factor in women’s perinatal and mental health, “particularly as they think about their roles as becoming mothers.” In frontline and fenceline communities, ecoanxiety is compounded by “real true danger”—the heightened climate risks these communities face.
Kamenetz gave two reasons for distinguishing ecoanxiety from other forms of anxiety. First, it underscores the idea that “mental health is not just an individual experience.” It is not a matter of “one person’s feelings, one person going to a doctor, one person getting medication. It is “something that affects everybody on the planet and almost everyone on the planet is starting to have feelings in response to it.”
Second, “when we think about anxiety, we think about coping.” Some coping strategies are designed to be soothing (mindfulness, therapy, medication). But it’s also important to take “action-focused coping” that directly addresses the impacts of climate change.
There are varied ways to support, enlist, and activate parents and other caregivers
Kamenetz discussed how we might organize our thinking about the experience of caregivers and how to involve them in fighting climate change. She asked participants to imagine parents who are not yet activated but who are feeling anxious. Perhaps they are worried about the effects of seasonal allergies on their children’s asthma, impending air conditioning bills, or news of the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Kamenetz cited the basic needs that all families have for themselves and on behalf of their children: safety, belonging, learning, protection, hope. Then she framed the question: How can people and organizations that are set up to support young children and the people who care for them increase climate resilience as part of a whole-of society effort?
She sketched out five general categories:
acute disaster resources
health and safety resources
foundations of climate literacy
social-emotional support
community and action.
1, 2: Acute disaster resources; health and safety resources
Parents need expanded health and safety resources to help them prepare for both acute and ongoing climate risks. That includes messages about sun and air quality safety, what to do during large storms, and planning for disruptions that might cause children to leave their homes. Kamenetz offered some examples of ways to frame these messages for young children. (For instance: Sometimes we stay inside when the air is not clean, or the sun is too hot, or there is a big storm. We might have to go to a shelter; here’s what it is and how it works.)
3: Foundations of climate literacy
Kamenetz offered ideas about how providers and pediatricians can support parents in helping their children develop early climate literacy. She offered several examples of values and activities that can be adapted to a climate lens; noting, along with Martin, that they are already part of high-quality early child care.
care of one’s self and the environment
nature and outdoor play
empathy for living things: children are innately biophilic—they love living things and can be encouraged to care for them
social-emotional well-being: how we deal with and regulate emotions
concrete actions: simple steps to expand the notion of care for the environment into children’s surroundings.
In the context of early childhood, concrete actions might be saving water and energy, reducing food waste, using lower-emissions forms of transportation, watering trees or leaving out water for animals when it’s hot, or clearing leaves from drains before a storm.
Oliver added that she would like to see the concept of “the circle of life” as part of early education.
4, 5: Social-emotional support; community and action
Kamenetz called on the panel to think broadly about ways that pediatricians’ offices, early childhood centers, and in-home providers can offer social and emotional support to families, ways to strengthen community ties, and ways these steps can lay the foundation for action. In the climate space, these concerns are intertwined. “Connecting to each other helps us deal with the social and emotional impacts of climate anxiety. And beyond mental health support, what works for climate anxiety is climate action. We don’t have any response to climate anxiety without having real-world action to actively engage in hope.
Parents are already civically engaged and they are more concerned than the average American about climate change. But like many Americans, according to a 2022 survey by Families for a Future, parents often don’t participate in climate actions because “they don’t know how to help.” They often feel that the problem is insurmountable and that individual actions will not make a difference. Families for a Future discovered that parents are most likely to mobilize in response to messages that push back against this fatalism. Such messages emphasize that existing solutions and technologies can defend against the worst impacts of climate change. Messages that built the sense of efficacy were also effective, as were messages that highlighted tangible, personal benefits (comfortable places to go to school, clean air, walkable neighborhoods).
Kamenetz said that to convey those messages, we should build “community through conversation.” Parents told the Climate Advocacy Lab that the two actions they would be most willing to take were contacting members of their communities and organizing events on climate.
In addition, research is supporting the importance of intergenerational climate conversations. Children who are educated and activated on climate influence their entire households. Kamenetz suggested finding ways for two-generational or parent-engagement programming along the lines of climate cafés, gatherings to discuss a range of topics related to climate change, climate anxiety, climate literacy, and climate action.
Kamenetz also discussed opportunities in targeting fathers and grandfathers by “activating their moral authority” as people who also care for young children. “Let’s activate traditional masculine values and talk about being climate protectors and defenders.”
In response to a question on how to sustain parents’ engagement, Martin stressed the importance of “ongoing communication” and “connecting people,” keeping in mind that not everyone has access to social media. That means “being able to pull together community meetings, to be able to find those parents who want to organize and lead the effort.” Kamenetz stressed the importance of relationships “with someone who they trust, who they care about, who cares about them, who is in communication with them about this issue. It could be their pastor, it could be their teacher, or it could be a friend.”
Clinton framed the challenge: “We do know what works to mitigate climate change, to help better protect children, and we need to be marshaling all of our energy and intentionality and resources and networks to move toward putting those solutions into action.”
“It’s what we do every day”: early childhood centers are hubs for climate resilience
Investing in young children and the spaces that nurture them is critical not only to building their resilience, but also to building overall community resilience, so they will play a crucial role in responding to climate change. Panelists and task force members discussed the role of early childhood centers as places where “people organize and connect to other community efforts,” as Kamenetz put it. Centers keep families connected to other services and support.
Kamenetz discussed how COVID-19 provided a “moving example” of this role in action. She described interviewing early child care leaders and in-home providers who—with little information or support—figured out ways to keep their communities safe. With climate change, “we have a chance to do it a lot better, what behaviors will help us as a society be safe and healthy? What is the knowledge that we need to have in the climate crisis?” The information we provide to young children and the behaviors we reinforce in the early child care setting can carry over to the home and community.
Martin, the provider, said simply, “It’s what we do every day…..If you have your child in a quality environment, we are going to focus on everything going on around us to keep our parents up to date.” She stressed the need for adequate resources, including informational materials that can be easily distributed.