“I’m sure the mayor will respond to you – they love getting stuff from kids,” I promised my kids, crossing my fingers. In the back of my head, I thought “Damn right, she better.”

I was trying to convince them to write letters to our local city government officials about climate change. While heavy topics like climate change can seem scary for adults to talk to kids about, finding ways to empower kids can help them be much less anxiety-inspiring. When kids know that they are not helpless – that they can make a difference and that their parents want to do it with them – they can tackle hard topics much better than we would expect.

It’s also a matter of giving them the right tools. In addition to engaging in activism, I was testing out my Family Climate Action Toolkit on my own kids. (They knew they were the guinea pigs and enjoy the opportunity to critique my stuff.) Finding the right activities is huge.

Communicating to local government officials is so powerful exactly because it’s doable and has real impact on their lives. I regularly attend my city’s bike advisory committee meetings and can point to bike lanes and other changes that have come about because of our work. After discussing that we can’t bike to the ice cream store safely, my older son has become far more interested in my bike meetings. While calling in on Zoom, he manages to pay attention for far longer to bike advocacy conversations than he seems willing to listen to his teacher talking about spelling.

A few days after I scanned in their letters and emailed them off, I saw a response in my email box.

“Your observations are correct, and we need to do more to control climate change,” I read from an email from one of our city councilors. I sighed with relief. That email was followed by another one from a different city council member. Contrary to my claim, the mayor never wrote back (really?!), but two council members responding was pretty damn good.

My kids weren’t exactly jumping up and down when I told them, but they seemed satisfied. Most importantly, they knew that they had been heard. That they could make a difference. Much of the time, that’s one of the most important things we can teach our kids.

To do this same activity with your kids (complete with templates for a variety of writing abilities, including “pre-writers”), check out our Family Climate Justice Toolkit.