Parenting in the Apocalypse
What sticks
My kids and I have a variation of the same conversation about once a week.
“Dad, how come you never drive us to school?”
“All our friends get driven.”
“Why do you always make us walk?”
“But it’s a blizzard/pouring rain/tornado/35° out there!”1
My answer is always the same:
“Walking is good for the world and good for you.”
I know. I’m that parent.
But something interesting happened when my oldest kid started the conversation again last week; my youngest answered for me. She’s been learning about ways to care for the earth in her grade 1 class and they were taking a tally on how many kids drive, roll, or walk to school. She was able to make a connection between a value we’re trying to live by and what her class was teaching.
She was also super excited to walk home in the pouring rate that week.
It’s a small win but I’ll take it.
The whole thing got me thinking about what “sticks” when it comes to parenting and how we talk about things that really matter with our kids. It really is less about those one-off conversations that can feel really big and important; and instead is more about the regular and consistent conversations that add up over time. It’s also what we communicate through our actions and habits. What sticks is the aggregate.2
The end of the world is a popular genre. Countless movies, shows, books, and video games have capitalized on this. There’s a particular sub-genre though that seems to have a particular resonance; surviving an apocalyptic wasteland with a child in your care. The recent success of HBO’s Last of Us demonstrates just how much this concept seems to connect with people. It’s easy to see why, there’s an added layer of tension that comes with bringing a kid into a survival scenario. You care about their safety, but also their future. It’s not enough for them to make it through just one moment of danger, it’s about who they need to become to make it through them all. It’s about them picking up the skills and instincts necessary for them to survive. It’s about what sticks.
Parenting in the apocalypse is a rough gig.
This isn’t a thought piece on climate despair. As Rebecca Solnit says, “the emergency is not over. The outcome is not decided. We are deciding it now.” (Not Too Late) I am not saying that we need to teach our kids how to survive a nightmarish wasteland. Probably.
The thing about putting a parenting dynamic into the centre of these stories of societal collapse is that even though it increases tension in the present, it also raises the possibility of building a better world in the future. It’s not enough to teach kids how to survive if you can’t also teach them how to love and be loved. As the brilliant novel (and show) Station Eleven put it, “Survival is insufficient.”
Parenting kids in the age of the climate crisis is about holding all these tensions together. We need to help our kids adopt more sustainable ways of living than we likely had growing up. We also need to protect them in the present and make sure that they feel safe. And we need to teach them how to love and be loved, to notice and care for all living things, to see beyond their self-interest and to help us build a better world. I hope it all sticks.
Walking with my kids has become one of the main ways I get to try and build that aggregate. We get 20 min together before and after school to talk about our days, notice things in our neighbourhood that we wouldn’t see if we drove by them, learn how to dress for the weather, and stop and play at the park on the way home.
Amazingly, at the park they no longer care how extreme the weather is.
I sometimes do though… 🥶
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P.S. I know not everyone has the ability or luxury to walk their kids to and from school, I am fortunate enough to have that freedom right now. This was not written with in the spirit of trying to shame anyone (see Margaret’s wonderful piece from a couple weeks ago on this). This is just one area in my relationship with my kids that I am choosing to use as a space to communicate environmental values with them. Your family may have an entirely different space through which you can do that.
Weekly News Digest - “The Blowhole”
Here are some emerging stories and events that we think will have an impact on our region that we’re keeping our eye on.
Universal Public Services: The Power of Decommodifying Survival - Jason Hickel shares a fascinating idea for how free essential goods and services might be a way forward for us.
SCGC Save the Greenbelt Fundraiser - A little bit of self-promotion here, but the Simcoe County Greenbelt Coalition is running a GoFundMe to help us continue to fight for healthy, sustainable communities here in the region.
Here’s Margaret Atwood lending her voice to help us out with this. Please consider sharing the gofundme link across your networks and, of course, giving if you’re able.
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This one’s an exaggeration; though I do believe that there’s no bad weather as long as you’re dressed for it.
I worked with teens for about a decade and they rarely remembered specific instructions their parents gave them; but a lot of them could speak in generalizations. “My mom always gets on me about this…” or “my dad never lets me do this…” Memory is weird and those sort of narratives we tell ourselves are what stay.