Raising kids is hard enough. How do we do it now when existential dread is such a major part of youth experience? And how do we keep ourselves mentally healthy enough to be good at both our professional climate work and parenting?
Today's show is with Ariella Cook-Shonkoff, psychotherapist and author of the new book, Raising Anti-Doomers: How to Bring Up Resilient Kids Through Climate Change and Tumultuous Times.
She answers a bunch of questions I have about how much I should actually be staring into the abyss (but not whether it also stares back into me, weird I know...), agency, how to think about individual vs. collective safety, and how to bring children into a world where the grownups are either asking these enormous questions or pretending we don't need to.
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Resources
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Ariella Cook-Shonkoff's website
Ariella's book, Raising Anti-Doomers: How to Bring Up Resilient Kids Through Climate Change and Tumultuous Times
Ariella's Psychology Today blog, "The Anti-Doomer Mindset
Cultivating Resilience in an Age of Uncertainty"
Climate Action Venn Diagrams from Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hey, thanks for listening to Reversing Climate Change. I’m your host, Ross Kenyon. Before we get going, I’d love to tell you a little bit about our sponsors. They make the show possible. I would love it if you could listen for just a minute while I tell you about Philip Lee LLP and Arbonics.
If you work in carbon removal, you very well may have come across Philip Lee LLP’s work. I originally saw Philip Lee give a presentation about some of the common provisions within offtake agreements, and I was impressed by the quality of their scholarship and their work, and I’m happy that we’re able to stay in touch and finally do this together. I think the law is an underrepresented part of what happens within carbon removal. We assume it’s the background, we assume it’s the mechanics. It actually takes a very smart and creative person to be a good lawyer. If you’ve ever had a bad lawyer, you know that there’s quite a big difference between a good and a bad lawyer.
What’s good about Philip Lee, beyond the good experience that I’ve had personally, is that they’re also just the largest legal team dedicated to the financing and development of carbon projects globally. They were awarded Environmental Finance’s VCM Law Firm of the Year for each of the last two previous years. They have offices in the US, Europe and the UK. If you have business law needs around nature-based carbon projects or engineered ones, if you’re working with sustainable aviation fuels and the integration with CORSIA, anything to do with the VCM generally, Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, the CRCF that’s coming out of the EU now, get in touch with Philip Lee. If you’re working in this field, you really do need a good eye to the law. These projects need legal care. There’s a lot of structuring that takes place. It’s really not turnkey at this point still, and there’s a lot more innovation and creativity that’s going to be needed to make sure that the legal infrastructure that supports carbon removal is there. The link is in the show notes.
Our other sponsor is Arbonics. Arbonics is great. They’ve been on the podcast before. I did a show with Lisett Luik, which I’ll link to in the show notes too. Arbonics is working on forestry in the Baltic states of Europe. Europe used to be much more heavily forested. The great majority of forestry projects take place in the Global South, which is generally a good thing, but we also do need forestry to take place in the EU and in Europe as well. Arbonics has put out some great research recently about the state of afforestation projects, about the bottlenecks in the industry, why the high quality credits are selling out far ahead of issuance, and what that means for people who want to be buying carbon removal credits for forestry but cannot. It’s a really important set of questions that Arbonics addresses with grace. I would recommend checking out their work. If you want to support forestry, give Arbonics a look. Link is in the show notes there. Thanks for listening, and now I will go into the show itself.
Ross Kenyon: Hey, thanks for listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon and I’m a carbon removal entrepreneur. Before I tell you about today’s guest, if I could please ask you to open your podcast app right now. You hopefully haven’t started washing the dishes yet. You’re just putting soap on the sponge. You have a quick brief moment before you get into podcast listening disassociating mode, and I want to capture you now. Open up that podcast app. Five stars on Spotify, five stars on Apple Podcasts. Write a quick review on Apple Podcasts. If your hands aren’t soapy already, just say, I love this show, it’s weird in exactly the ways that I like. I would be super grateful. There’s also an option to become a paid subscriber for $5 a month that gets rid of all of the programmatic ads from Spotify. You get bonus content and you get to support the show. It’s great for so many reasons and very much noticed and appreciated by me.
Today’s show is with Ariella Cook-Shonkoff. Ariella wrote a really interesting book called Raising Anti-Doomers: How to Bring Up Resilient Kids Through Climate Change and Tumultuous Times. If you work in climate or carbon removal, if you just care about it, it’s a difficult field to remain resilient in the face of. If one doesn’t have a good grip on one’s emotions, I think there’s a real risk of being a difficult colleague, a difficult spouse, a difficult parent, and you deserve better than that. You only get one life. Therapy can be a big part of what it means to deal with a world that is, to put it lightly, imperfect.
Much of the conversation and advice that is given regarding emotions is that you’re not necessarily meant to allow yourself to be ruled by emotions, but you’re also not supposed to be so stoic that you can’t feel them. The goal is to sit with it. It’s supposed to feel the way that it feels, and your goal for feeling a feeling is to not run through it into the next thing, not to distract yourself with the next prestige drama or podcast. This doesn’t apply if you’re listening to my podcast. That’s psychologically approved. I will make an exception for this specific episode. You’re meant to sit with it and feel it. It’s not always going to feel great, and that’s OK. The expectation that feeling should always feel good is a weird one. I’m not even sure where we got that idea, because basically anyone who works on feelings to any capacity, as far as I know, will tell you that’s not a reasonable assumption at all and is not actually good for us. The second half of the conversation deals with how those lessons apply to parenthood. I hope you enjoy. That’s enough of an intro. Thanks for listening, and here is today’s show.
Ross Kenyon: Ariella, thanks for being here with me.
Ariella Cook-Shonkoff: Thank you for having me.
Ross Kenyon: I’m glad to have you. We haven’t done a show quite on this topic yet, and look, it’s about raising anti-doomer kids, but I’m basically getting a free therapy session out of you today. I think a lot of the advice in the book probably equally applies to people listening, who I imagine many of them are adults and some portion of them are parents. Where do we even start with a topic like this? If you could only give someone one nugget, and granted you wrote a whole book about it, how do you come to grips with the impending sense of doom around climate, ecology, toxicity, any and all of those things?
Ariella Cook-Shonkoff: I think you don’t dive head first into it, and you don’t run fleeing madly away. The work is in cultivating your ability to tolerate some distressing news, or distressing facts. This is where we’re at. And trying your best to develop your ability to tolerate and be with your emotions, to find supports that are helpful for you, whether it’s social supports or your own strategies for calming your nervous system. So that would be the nugget. I call it the sweet spot of engagement, or the anti-doomer sweet spot, so that you’re not going to veer too much in either direction.
Ross Kenyon: I think I probably could have substituted in there any traumatic or difficult subject area and you probably could have said the same thing. What you said is very much a mainline therapeutic culture response, which is that you’re not meant to run away from it, you’re not supposed to be engulfed by it, you’re supposed to sit with it.
Ariella Cook-Shonkoff: Yeah, OK. Fair enough, fair criticism. I think it’s good. It’s very sensible advice. But I think it’s easier said than done. That was the overview, but that’s the point of the book, to give lots of tools for how the heck do you do this. The thing is, we know, in therapy and many different approaches to therapy, that there are ways that we can work with the body and the nervous system. I think that is the emphasis a lot in my book. Work with creativity, the nervous system, with the natural world, some with the thoughts, some with cognition. But there’s definitely a more holistic emphasis in the book of, how do you widen the sweet spot? To use therapisty language, the window of tolerance, which you may or may not be familiar with.
Ross Kenyon: There’s a preconception, I think, with therapy, maybe not for those who have spent time in it, that it is a heavily cognitive type of work. I think this probably goes back to classical psychoanalysis and laying on the couch, and people are still somehow stuck in that. But I think much of therapy is actually about getting people out of their heads and into their bodies, because culturally it seems like we still live pretty much up there and neglect everything below the head.
Ariella Cook-Shonkoff: You mean that there is this tendency of, OK, therapy happens up in this region, the head, in the prefrontal cortex, where we have to analyse and sift through and explain. There’s really been a shift in more cognitive based therapies, or psychoanalysis, to this more somatic orientation. I think of Peter Levine, some of his research and somatic experiencing, and there are other orientations as well. There was a shift to this idea that the body houses emotions, that emotions are embedded in the body, in the nervous system and the trauma response. And it’s actually activated all the time. We have them on smaller scales. If we stop short and don’t want to crash into the car in front of us, let alone some more major stuff if we’re afraid for our safety or the safety of others.
For me and my work, there’s a lot of body based work. I’m very integrative, so we’re also talking. But sometimes when I’m meeting with clients in my office, it’s making suggestions of, maybe we do less of this talking brain to brain, and maybe we take a little detour. I’m an art therapist, so there are art supplies. I invite my clients, and sometimes I’ll even say, because there can be nerves around it, like, I don’t know, this is new for me. Just to really demystify it and open it up so that it feels accessible, because it’s just a tool for growth, for healing, for grappling with difficult emotions.
And one thing I’ll add on, in the climate psychology field, one of the things I’m appreciating is how different orientations are melding together and shaping the field. It’s been interesting to witness. You have different evidence based orientations, mind based or body based orientations, and there’s a trying to figure out some of the best ways to support people in coping with climate distress.
Ross Kenyon: If someone comes in and they have climate anxiety, I think one listening might think that the way to work through climate anxiety is to do something that is talk oriented, and that you’re going to untangle this knot in your brain. How does it work if you are doing art at the same time, or you’re doing art instead of verbalising everything? Does the emotion get processed in the same way? Is it better somehow? Why do we think everything has to pass through the linguistic part of our brain? Is that just me, by the way? I know it’s not true, but it’s in my head. Is it just me that tends in that direction? I have a podcast, so I process things verbally. This is what I do. But I also know that it’s not the only way, and I privilege it to such a high extent.
Ariella Cook-Shonkoff: No, I feel like you’re the norm. In terms of even people I meet with, absolutely. I think there’s comfort in that and people are used to that. So the typical client that comes in is just like you. They’re ready to talk, talk, talk, and we might start there. That’s kind of where I might start a session. But there comes a point where I might say, hey, you’re feeling some big feelings about this, how would it feel to maybe make a little art around it? And that could be the first session, or it might lead up to that the next session.
What happens is there’s a toggling between the two. If you’re all up in your head and intellectualising things, you’re actually not necessarily tapping down into your deeper emotions. In fact, you can stay up in the soft denial of intellectualising, and not coming down and really feeling what’s going on in my body. And it’s those emotions that can lead to actual action. There are studies that show eco-anxiety is correlated with taking more action and doing something about it. So there’s a missed opportunity if we stay up in our minds trying to make sense of everything versus coming down.
I had a client draw his emotional soup that had to do with climate distress, and it was fascinating. I’m sitting there, and then at the end I checked in about how he felt in creating, and while creating what emotions came up. And then you look at this as a separate entity from you. It’s come out of you, but there’s a separation, and there’s an opportunity to see things differently and to talk through metaphors. So I’ll often explore the art with my client. And with that client I did. I’m looking at this soup and hearing his story about it. And it deepens the work, in my humble opinion. This is the work I do, so of course I’m biased.
Ross Kenyon: As a layperson, I think about something like CBT, cognitive behavioural therapy, as a set of techniques where you’re examining your beliefs and feeling, is this truthful, is this likely to happen, do I have anxiety about something that doesn’t make sense, and playing it through your head and writing out how this might be, and would it actually be as bad as I think? Interrogating your feelings in this way. How does something like that work when the sources of anxiety are real and potentially as bad or worse than you think? If you think climate is going to be an area that’s going to cause much grief this century and beyond, it almost seems like some of those techniques, do they even still work? What do you do to manage grief ahead of time? And just, what do I do with my family, and where should I live, and questions like that.
Ariella Cook-Shonkoff: You just tagged on a lot of questions at the end of that one. But you were talking at the beginning about reality testing, can we test this thing, is it really going to be that bad, and whatever that may be. But as you say, in the case of climate change, it really is that bad. So how do those tools work? A lot of the folks that I meet that are coming in with those challenges, a lot of it is about validation of their feelings, of their experience. Someone said, I just want to know I’m not crazy. I can’t talk about this with my other therapist. That’s interesting. Not all therapists, you know. I have this more climate aware orientation, and not all therapists are there, or have done the work, or are expanding that part of their practice.
How do you manage feelings around climate when they’re not, you know, what happens if I wear the green shirt and everyone thinks I’m the biggest idiot around, and you’re like, well, that’s clearly, you’re overreacting, or let’s contextualise this differently or think about likelihoods. Whereas this is just, bad things are coming and I feel bad about it. One of the interesting things, the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication has shown that there are increasing numbers of alarmed folks. Americans, the Alarmed segment has increased, or the concerned segments have increased. So many of us are concerned, but there’s this thinking of, well, other people aren’t talking about it, and so I’m not going to talk about it either. So we’re not talking about all that. We’re really feeling it on the side.
When you say that, it’s really understandable. It’s human nature to look around and take some social cues. But how do we move the dial that way if we’re all agonising within ourselves and we’re not able to connect and even just be real? I like Katharine Hayhoe’s work around fostering climate communications. You don’t even have to use that word. She talked a little bit about how that word is triggering, climate, and it’s very much a political word. So can you talk about, well, gosh, it’s dry, or the rains are really affecting this or that, or, this is scary, we’re having hurricanes every season. Can you have conversations about what’s happening without using language that could potentially create more divides than bring people together? Ultimately, if we come together and just admit, many of us, and if you look at the global statistics it’s even higher as to how many people are alarmed and concerned about climate change, we’re all feeling that, or a majority of us are, but we’re just not talking about it.
Ross Kenyon: I’m someone prone to peer into the abyss, and I find it to be useful sometimes, but I think I stay there a bit too long. And I think the climate movement in general has a lot of toxic positivity in it. I think a lot of that is related to the people who are working to commercialise technology. Do you remember when Bernie had already deeply lost the Democratic primary, and there was that, this is how Bernie can still win? And it became increasingly deranged as it became less and less likely. The math doesn’t even work any more, it’s not going to happen. Sometimes climate stuff feels like that, where I’m like, are we going to figure this out in time?
The model that I was using for it was the Indiana Jones, the walls coming down, he grabs his hat, basically comes down right about to crush his arm, and we barely made it. Now we’re rolling back policies. We’re losing years and years here. And I’m pretty freaked out. I’m still doing the work, and having that amount of agency does make me feel better. To what degree that’s a purely personal therapeutic benefit rather than a societal benefit, open question. Because we also may not actually pull this off. We might be living in a climate changed world that’s really chaotic. And I bounce between those two things, where I’m involved in my work, having agency and feeling productive and helpful for everyone, and then occasionally I’ll read something or look at something and be like, do we need to move? Where is the safest place in the world in the coming decades? Which countries are going to survive and which ones are not going to do so well? Give me some advice. How do I deal with that?
Ariella Cook-Shonkoff: I actually want to, maybe this sounds funny, but I want to commend you. Let’s stay with that. You said you have some tendencies to spiral down, but you don’t stay there. You’re not stuck there. You’re not in that rigid mindset of, you’ve given up and you’ve written things off and you’re going to go create a bunker for your family somewhere and not run your podcast. So I think that toggling between the states of, this is how the world is, and I want it to be, what can we do to improve? Can the climate change movement actually be moving forward, efficiently making change? How can we get the government to act, or world governments to act, but certainly our own, which is now moving in the opposite direction? You’re asking those questions periodically. I think that keeps you on the edge.
And then you bring whatever into your podcast that you bring. But then I’m guessing you find some way to, what are you doing? Maybe I put this on you, or I can also share. But there are tools you’re using to stay regulated, to stay hopeful. I like to think of hope as the North Star, and we’re all just orienting to it and reorienting to it over and over again, no matter what’s going on, so that we don’t give up. I think you’re doing a good job.
Ross Kenyon: That’s nice to hear. The biggest psychological or maybe spiritual question that I have with regard to this is, I end up feeling some amount of pre-panic, or thinking of which parts of the world are going to be safest. It’s a big expense and logistically very difficult to move kids and family and change professional licensure and do these things, and you’re like, where actually should we go? But then I end up feeling some amount of guilt to it too. How would I feel if, let’s just pretend I’m right, it’s going to be bad enough that those concerns are very valid, and I would hate to be proven right about that. How would I feel if I ended up in the gated community before the walls came up and everything became really bad? Is my job to look after my family and put them somewhere safe? Or should I be a humane voice inside of a community that’s collapsing or changing, or however bad, in this scenario we’re imagining it’s bad? What’s actually the role of someone like me? I don’t know that either psychologically or spiritually or both, the role is just escape. But I do toy with feelings of escape. How healthy or unhelpful is that? How should I contextualise it?
Ariella Cook-Shonkoff: I appreciate this question, and your honesty about it. I felt the same way before, and I wrote about this in an article, about, should we get in an airplane and fly out of the area because the wildfires are bad, when I was experiencing my own eco-anxiety. So what I want to say is it’s a really natural human response. It’s the reactive response that we feel under threat. Maybe it’s the flight, you could call it, rather than the freezing and fighting. And you’re talking about the addition of a family, to look after your kids. Your job as a parent is to protect them. So it’s a very natural response.
And again, I know this is annoying, but staying with it. You don’t always give in to that first impulse. This is another little therapy model that might be helpful. It’s called wise mind. Do you know this one? Dialectical behaviour therapy.
Ross Kenyon: I don’t know about this wise mind.
Ariella Cook-Shonkoff: It’s DBT. It’s reason, rational thought, and emotion. Imagine the Venn diagram and they’re overlapping, and that little overlap is called wise mind. So that means you are thinking rationally and you’re feeling your feelings, and it’s this little sweet spot. So if you flee, perhaps you’re giving in to your fear, the adrenaline. Maybe that’s not as helpful. But the work you’re doing sounds a lot like wise mind work, where you feel, and, you’re somebody I don’t know and I’m using you, I hope it’s OK, I’m shining the light back on to you, but you have connection to your range of feelings, it sounds like, to do with what’s happening. You’re not numbed out. You’re feeling the feelings. And then you are also taking action and doing something. You have a podcast, and then you might be doing other work. That’s exactly channelling anxiety or distress into action, which is hope. That in itself is hope. And that models for your child something that can be done. And if many people are doing that, then we have a stronger social movement in that direction, collective action.
Ross Kenyon: So the good thing about my big hodgepodge of feelings is that I’m feeling them, exploring them. Sometimes they are coming out more strongly, other times I don’t feel the need to dwell on them so much. And somehow that all means that by miraculous therapy math, I ended up being a well adjusted person. No one’s ever accused me of that. How did you conjure this result?
Ariella Cook-Shonkoff: I’m not making this up. I’m thinking now about Dr Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s climate action Venn diagram. All We Can Save, and, anyway, it’s like another Venn diagram, but it’s climate action. It’s a way of configuring what to do when people are at a loss and don’t have direction and they feel bowled over emotionally, and like, I should do something, I want to do something, but what do I do? So examining your skill set, talents, maybe what you want to do, and then coming up with a direction, and then being able to take action and move forward and have an identity, so that you can actually sustainably engage in climate work. Of course it’s a lifelong endeavour that will take some tempering or modulating, but it gives you the direction. So I think you’re there. Congratulations.
But I want to validate that part of you that’s like, but what do I do about the doomer feelings? And they’re still there. I think that on a spiritual level or existential level, that’s just life. And it happens to be this unique existential threat that is climate change.
Ross Kenyon: I feel like denying that has often felt worse than allowing yourself to stare into this and feel the feeling of, yeah, this work may come to naught, we may be a day late and a dollar short, and really bad things happen and we could have avoided it had we all acted sooner. But we didn’t, and I’m concerned by that. But then I’ll see posts on LinkedIn sometimes that will be very much like making it inappropriate to feel that feeling, or somehow saying that it’s a betrayal to indulge in any sort of feelings of calamity. And I don’t like that. I don’t think that’s a good take. I don’t even think it makes us better at our work either. It’s good to know the stakes of what we’re doing, and in some ways I find it to be energising.
Ariella Cook-Shonkoff: Where did you hear that, that you’re not to indulge any of that?
Ross Kenyon: A lot of the takes that do well on LinkedIn tend to be toxically positive in a way that they’ll say, we’re still making amazing progress, things are still somehow great. It’s like the Bernie can still win thing. Progress is still happening, but not enough to solve all of my concerns really. And then it kind of shames you out of being like, this isn’t enough for me. I don’t think this is good enough.
Ariella Cook-Shonkoff: I totally understand that. Maybe just to reorient to the therapy world for a second, one of the most helpful supports there is, is these climate cafes. Have you heard of these climate cafes?
Ross Kenyon: [unclear] cafes, but I imagine there’s something similar.
Ariella Cook-Shonkoff: Death cafes. OK. So anyway, they started in the UK and they’ve made their way over. We have an affiliation with Climate Psychology Alliance there, and then there’s Climate Psychology Alliance North America here, which I’m part of. A climate cafe can be virtual, they can be in person, and there’s a facilitator, and it’s a twofold space for people’s real feelings, their grief, their sadness, their anger, their fears, whatever, even moments of joy, whatever comes up is welcome. And then there’s a holding tank and space for it, to really validate that. Because you’re right, toxic positivity, it makes me think of the hopium, which I mention in the book. It’s going to be fine, someone’s going to work it out and it’ll all be OK. That’s also denial. There has to be, I think, one foot in and one foot out of this whole thing, so that on a personal level, one foot into the muck of the emotions, one foot grounded in reality.
Ross Kenyon: I imagine some part of your work is probably about disappointment with family members in that similar way. What do you advise in cases like that?
Ariella Cook-Shonkoff: This is a really challenging time to even have a sense of reality, because of what’s happened with these alternative facts and news sources which are not based in fact and reality. It’s very confusing. So it’s actually easier than one might think to get caught up in it. I think it’s holding a little bit of grace for that. And I think it’s also, you don’t want to cut these people out of your life. If we start doing that, this is family. So at the end of the day, can there be ways to find common ground, to maybe create safety for a conversation? Maybe there are some ground rules. We don’t have to use climate change, but let’s talk about how we’re feeling, because there could be shared experiences there. Like, I’m kind of freaked out. I think there’s got to be some finding common ground and some attempts to stay connected and repair.
Ross Kenyon: Easier advice to say than to take. It’s hard to have a saint’s patience essentially. It just falls into a lacuna where it’s like, well, there’s no script for this. So anyway, back to the talking point that was on TV recently. Do I have to keep dealing with this person? That’s been a hard one. I think also part of therapy and maturity too is recognising that older family members and aunts and uncles and parents never had that great a sense of control. They never had as much of a grip on living life as maybe it looked like when you were a child. And then you grow up and realise that the world is run by people who have no clue what they’re doing, and it barely works at all, and it’s sort of a miracle that things do kind of work at all. I imagine that’s a fairly universal lesson of maturity. It doesn’t necessarily always feel good either. And you aspire to, OK, I’m not going to fall into the same traps of delusion and self deception that these people clearly have, and I can see it clearly. I’m sure I’ve got those too. I’m sure my kids will eventually look and be like, God, Dad really had a terrible blind spot with this. So disappointing.
Ariella Cook-Shonkoff: It’s interesting. I actually talk a lot about this in the book, and about relating to Greta Thunberg, because I felt like that. I’m not the same, but I had my version of that when I was young. So there is this reckoning of, what the heck are the adults doing? Why don’t they care more? That’s how I felt. We recycled and we did the things, but why aren’t they making this their passion and their life’s work? And then, like you say, you come into the adult world and it’s a bit of a mess. But particularly right now it feels more chaotic. It’s always been problematic in different ways, but this is pretty chaotic, our current political climate here.
Ross Kenyon: I have some sympathy for it too. I had a potential opportunity to commercialise some tech that is what is euphemistically deemed dual use. Do you know about any stuff like this?
Ariella Cook-Shonkoff: No, I’d love to hear though.
Ross Kenyon: It can be used in lots of ways. Dual use also means it’s military as well, essentially, is what I’m trying to say. There’s this tech that was sort of drone adjacent technology. I’m like, oh, this would be really great, because it would allow for a lot of GIS, geographic information systems, to be improved. It’ll improve uptime of drones. Everyone obviously right now is watching Ukraine, and how drone warfare and autonomous swarms are going to take place. The next war is going to look a lot like Ukraine but be much deadlier. It’ll be like watching the Crimean War, and then the Civil War that came afterwards was much worse and expanded on those tactics. So there was this more robust offering that was prestigious, like, cool. But also, how badly do I need the money?
And there are certainly cases where people will make the decision of, you know what, almost no matter what else, I just need to do this. So if it’s going to be dual use and some of that use is not going to be necessarily what I care about, whatever, my family needs to stay in their house and be able to eat. That’s the most charitable interpretation of a former generation not caring that much about the earth. Their concerns were making sure their family was taken care of in a more immediate way, and that they had paid labour and were able to be secure. And I feel that too. Which is a way of saying that we’re back in that complexity zone here too, where it’s like, cool, I’m sitting with it, sometimes it feels bad, sometimes you make a compromise, whatever. I have sympathy for people who did not take the more abstract, high minded way in the past.
Ariella Cook-Shonkoff: Are you doing that now? Do you take every single high road option presented to you?
Ross Kenyon: Is that to me? It’s kind of to anyone, but I’ll go first. No, I do not do that.
Ariella Cook-Shonkoff: I wouldn’t want to. I think people need to make the best choices and decisions for themselves. Everyone has different perspectives and ways of seeing things and different circumstances. But what popped up for me was values, the importance of aligning with values, and what you were saying about how you feel icky if you’re not doing that. So there’s more of that emotional ambiguity or discomfort. But all you can do is your best to follow those, and keep coming back to those, because we all have family values, cultural values, personal values. And if that can be our anchor, it’s going to help guide us, even if it doesn’t affect every decision that we make, or we can’t stay true to them all the time.
Ross Kenyon: Most of these questions I’ve dealt with, granted, if you’re a youth, oh God, I sound old, if you’re a young person listening, then this applies to you because you’re making decisions basically for yourself. I imagine most people listening are adults making decisions for themselves. But this changes quite a lot when you’re responsible for the upbringing of young people. Do the lessons that we’ve talked about already apply neatly on a one to one basis, what you transmitted to me, should that be transmitted to children? Are there additional steps or ways of thinking? How should we be preparing children for this world?
Ariella Cook-Shonkoff: It is similar in some ways. It’s always like this magic middle, because I talk in the book about finding the right Goldilocks porridge for your child. It depends on maybe their age or their developmental stage or what they’re going through. Life is stressful on the micro level. You go to school, you might have some trouble with a certain subject or a certain classmate, there could be all sorts of pressures as a child. So there’s enough going on. As a parent, finding the right time to maybe talk to your child, and the right messaging. There’s no one-size-fits-all for that.
What I use to make it really simple is the three Vs. Voice, validate and vision. Maybe this is the most actionable advice I could give, and none of it is, oh my gosh, I’ve never heard of that, brand new. It’s just an easy way to think about it. So voice is really providing opportunities for your child to voice concerns. And that might be even asking a direct question, because sometimes parents are afraid of that. But, hey, have you studied about climate change at all at school? That’s OK to ask. And then there’s opportunity to talk afterwards, versus maybe they’re afraid to mention it to their parent, to bring it up at all, and they heard some scary stuff at school, which has been the case from my experience. So voice is creating a safe space for kids to talk.
And then validate would be validating that their feelings are real, and not trying to fix or solve problems, which parents often jump into. And I’m guilty, by the way, of all of this. But just saying, yeah, it is scary. The nice thing about that is, I’m borrowing Harriet Shugarman’s work, which is empowerment points. If there’s something scary, you can also say, hey, there’s also some stuff that we can look at, some positive news, which is totally out there. There are a lot of wonderful projects and developments in the environmental world that just don’t get as much attention because they’re not in the mainstream media outlets as much. Sharing those empowerment points with kids can help balance, if they’re in a very low place, with some hope.
And the last V would be vision, which is agency really, and supporting your kid in developing a pathway to take action or do something that feels good to them. You can do that as something that you do as a family. It could be going to a protest. It could be picking up trash at the local park, whatever. So that’s one way to look at that.
Ross Kenyon: A question about the validation step. My child, if they said something like, I’m scared of this, I know the correct response is not invalidation. Well, there’s no reason to be afraid of that, or, that’s for babies. That’s a really pathologising, terrible way to respond to something like that. But if it’s more something like, oh yeah, I’m scared of spiders too, do kids feel that as being like, oh God, there’s no one at the helm? Even my parent feels fear about that. Or is that more like, oh, this is human, interesting, he also has a feeling that is similar to mine? How does a kid experience that?
Ariella Cook-Shonkoff: I think either. I think sometimes kids just like to know that they’re not alone, and to know that it’s normal. So it can feel good, because you could always say, if you’re co-parenting with a partner, well, sometimes mommy or daddy, whoever, helps with the spiders, and I’m scared of those. So I don’t think that’s the wrong answer for that question. I think that if your feelings are really intense and coming out like, oh my God, I’m so freaked out, and maybe it’s a bigger scale than a spider and we’re talking about climate change again, and those feelings are coming off you, your child can sense that. Then that can really have implications for them, where they absorb the trickle down emotions from the parents, and then might be acting out or internalising, because they don’t know what to do with the excess of emotions and they’re not feeling as safe at home. Does that make sense?
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. I’ve experimented with this too. My upbringing was much more, I doubt I am alone in having this family of origin experience, but feeling emotions really strongly was not a thing that we did as much. So if I’m grieving or crying or upset about something, I try not to run from the room or hide it. Even if I’m a little uncomfortable with it, I try to just, you know what, you’re just going to be brave and some water’s going to leave your eyes and that’s fine, and it’s better to see your dad cry than not. But I’ve also, it’s funny, seeing that happen, it hasn’t necessarily had the reaction of, oh, my dad’s an emotionally feeling person. It’s more like, is this scary, why is my dad really upset, is this safe, is an adult in control right now or not really? I feel like I’ve experienced that more in that latter kind of way. I’m not sure how to deal with that. And this obviously applies to climate too, because you don’t have to [unclear]. But what do I do with that?
Ariella Cook-Shonkoff: I wonder how you go from there. If you say something like, oh my gosh, I’m feeling some big feelings here, how does that affect you when daddy shows these feelings? If you say, how do you feel about that? I think it also could be, you could pause and say, listen, I want to talk to you about this more, but I just need to take like a five minute break and I’ll be back. And then you could come back and pick up the conversation. And again, just normalise, because emotions are normal and we all feel them. It’s part of being human, and what good modelling. So you’re saying he might feel like there’s no one at the helm, uh oh. Is that the kind of feeling?
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. And so there’s a retreat. There isn’t an, oh, I’m going to sit here. It’s more just like, OK, well, look at the time, I should go play with my toys now.
Ariella Cook-Shonkoff: But you’re modelling. That would be a great example of modelling. I’ve got to just take a minute, take a beat, come back, be like, yeah, those were big feelings, but I’m fine. I’m fine now. Daddy’s back at the helm. Something like that can work well.
Ross Kenyon: I imagine for a lot of parents they probably are dealing with, yeah, there’s actually not a great solution, we’re working on it, it’s an underdog kind of story right now, and we’re really trying, or certain people on the planet are really trying and others don’t care or are actively hindering it. And I also feel really uncomfortable and sad about the direction of what kind of world we’re leaving you. Is that good for kids to hear something like that? Does that make them feel, I mean, it sounds validating if they’re concerned by it, it can also freak them out if done incorrectly. The wisdom of knowing how to do this is probably really important.
Ariella Cook-Shonkoff: There is some element of, I don’t want to cookie cutter this. But one thing I always say is start really small and simple, and it’s almost like your test. You’re taking a litmus test to see where your child is at with this information, and then you know what to do next from there. Because it might be that that’s enough for now. You’re going to really pay attention to his cues, his signals, his non-verbals. How do you even ask him, what do you think of that? And then you could share a little bit more. Do you want to hear more or not really? And maybe let’s talk about this another time. I think the mistake that parents can make is too much too fast. That can really scare and overwhelm kids, feeling like you need to rattle off the state of the world.
Just put yourself back there too. I do this sometimes. I’m like, gosh, when I was nine, did I need to know everything? No, I didn’t. So you start small and you can build up, rather than, once it’s out, it’s out. And of course you only have so much control, because there’s the internet, and teenagers get into all sorts of other things, have access to information in different ways, or through their peers or teachers. So then you’re having to help ground and maybe even reframe if there’s too much information that has overwhelmed your child.
I think it’s interesting too, how you then go on to parent. This informs how you parent. I had a similar experience to you growing up, when no one was talking about this and that. But I’m making a different decision with my kids, and my husband’s totally from a Berkeley, sharing, emotional family. So they know quite a bit about the birds and the bees and stuff like that. But with climate, it’s kind of interesting. We’ve had conversations in the car about something which was [unclear]. I don’t even know how they were tracking it, but they were. Which just shows that kids are always paying attention and listening.
Ross Kenyon: I think I got this from Dan Siegel originally.
Ariella Cook-Shonkoff: That’s the window of tolerance guy.
Ross Kenyon: I don’t recall that term, but very much like push pull dynamics and information sharing with kids too. Where they asked for it, like, oh, do you want to know more about this, are you curious? But not just treat them like an adult at the dinner table and share everything terrible about the world so they can become little adults ahead of their time. But also not hiding things, and also not trying to make them your peer.
Ariella Cook-Shonkoff: I know. What I do is skew towards generalising. You can be general. You don’t have to share so much info. There’s a war going on. It might not be appropriate to share with your child any more than that. There’s a war going on, it’s really sad. That’s a lot right there.
Ross Kenyon: It is a lot right there.
Ariella Cook-Shonkoff: That’s probably 70% of what they need to know. And maybe some details, but are the details helping? Do you need to see the carnage, or know how modern weapons tear bodies apart? Do they need all that info? No. And just, again, put yourself back there. How would you have felt hearing all the details? I do hear from kids a lot that life is so complicated. There’s so much access to stuff. But we as parents can help with that, help them navigate it a little, by not increasing their information overload or oversharing about hard life stuff.
Ross Kenyon: I have a strong memory of being on a Boy Scout trip when I was probably like 10 or 11, maybe even nine. And I remember the kid I was sharing a tent with was telling me about World War Two. And all I remember him talking about is just, there’s this guy Hitler, and he was pretty mean and whatever. I was captivated by this, and I went home and started watching the History Channel. But the level of understanding of that was, Hitler was mean. Which actually is probably 70% of what happened. That dude was pathologically extremely toxic, to put it lightly. But that was the general.
Ariella Cook-Shonkoff: Yeah, for a nine year old that was enough.
Ross Kenyon: And I can trickle out from there and that’s fine. I didn’t necessarily need every, I think anything more than that at that point might have been like, oh God, the world does this to its members, this is what happens. I don’t know if that’s an exact perfect fit, but nine year old brains kind of do work like that. It’s harder than we think, but also, that’s enough.
Ariella Cook-Shonkoff: They can’t sift through things quite yet. Their brains have not developed to the extent of our brains.
Ross Kenyon: Ariella, thanks for letting me ask you questions basically to my benefit and to no one else’s, unless they’re me. I hope people listening can generalise out from my unique psychology. There’s a lot of great advice here, and in the book too, about how to raise kids that are properly adjusted in a climate changing world. Thanks for doing all of that work.
Ariella Cook-Shonkoff: You’re welcome, Ross. I hope it’s helpful to people. That’s why I wrote this book, to help support the parent club.
Ross Kenyon: And if people want to pick up a copy, it’s everywhere, right? All the normal book places?
Ariella Cook-Shonkoff: It is, and you can certainly order a copy from my website, ariellacookshonkoff.com, and you’re welcome to follow me on my social media, or check out my Psychology Today blog as well.
Ross Kenyon: The links to all of those things are in the show notes, go check those out. Thanks for being here, Ariella.
Ariella Cook-Shonkoff: Thank you again, Ross.
