Activism & Politics

How to Talk to Your Kids About Climate Change

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 1 Comment

Has your child heard about climate change and are starting to ask questions? Or do you want to broach this difficult topic but don’t know where to start? Here are good ways to talk to kids about climate change.

How to Talk to Kids About Climate Change (Photo: Group of kids in front of a capital building holding a poster saying 'Kids Want Climate Justice')

“We’re going to tell the people who make the rules that we want clean air and water for everyone,” I told my then three-year-old as we made signs for the People’s Climate Mobilization. As we got ready for the march, I struggled with what to say to him about it. In the end, I settled on the vague “air and water” statement. A clear mom fail at avoiding the issue.

Or was it? After all, three is awfully young to face the fact that our everyday choices could affect everyone on the planet in both in the present day and hundreds of years from now. There are plenty of adults who can’t grapple with that reality. Climate change activism is my personal passion, but it’s not right to force it on him before he’s ready.

Since then, I’ve thought a lot about explaining climate change to our kids. More than a year later, we still haven’t directly explained it. But now I see it as more of a process than a one-and-done conversation.

In addition to my personal interest, my professional background is informing a lot of my approach. As a science and environmental communicator, talking about climate change and related issues is one of my specialties.

Here are some big principles to consider if you are going to  talk to kids about climate change:

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Our Creative Alternative to the Thanksgiving Myth

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 3 Comments

Our Creative Alternative to the Thanksgiving Myth (Photo: Table set with a variety of food for Thanksgiving)

“They’re not dressing up as Native Americans, are they?” I said, wrinkling my nose. After reading about how cultures aren’t costumes around Halloween and how the whitewashed version of the Thanksgiving story is painfully inaccurate, I hope that my son’s preschool isn’t re-enacting the famous version of the Thanksgiving narrative. Regardless of their curriculum, I know we won’t be repeating it in our household. So we have to come up with an alternative.

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How to Help the Environment While Making the Most of Your Time

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / Leave a comment

Do you want to do what you can to help the environment but can’t find the time? Here are eight ways you can do both!

How to Help the Environment While Making the Most of Your Time (Photo: A photo of a green tree in a field with a clock superimposed over it)

“I don’t have enough time!” I lament to my husband, as I stay up too late washing the dishes yet again. I’m certainly not alone in this cry, as anyone who raises small children knows. The days may be long, but it still feels as if there are never enough hours. But despite all that, our family still lives in as environmentally-friendly a manner as we can. As many “green” activities take more time than conventional ones – I’m looking at you, dish rags that we need to wash – how do we find the time to help the environment?

Some of it is reorganizing our priorities. But in many cases, I’ve found some shortcuts to save time and still help the environment.

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The Absolutely Best Ways to Donate to a Food Drive

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Want to give effectively to a food drive to a local food bank?

The Absolutely Best Ways to Donate to a Food Drive. We'll Eat You Up, We Love You So (Photo: Cans of food stacked in very large piles)

You rarely have the opportunity to decide how to spend your co-workers’ hard-earned money. But as the one responsible for running our yearly food drive, I wanted both them and the food bank to get the best bang for their buck. Just randomly picking out whatever I felt like at the grocery store wasn’t going to cut it. But how could I donate in the most effective way possible?

I’m not the only one who struggles with this question. Thanksgiving and Christmas are the “food drive holidays,” where everyone from churches to Boy Scouts troops are collecting cans to donate to food banks. Unfortunately, the donations to these drives aren’t as helpful as they could be because people just aren’t aware of the most effective ways to give.

Between my experiences running the food drives and reading up on the subject, I’ve found some really handy rules to guide your food drive giving.

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What is Sustainability?

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What is Sustainability? Sustainability is about a lot more than what we buy - it's about community. (Photo: A tree with red berries)

Pushing my son on the biggest tree swing I’ve ever seen, he declared, “This is fun!” As I half-listened to a talk on medicinal plants, I had to agree. We were at the second annual Paw Paw Festival at Long Creek Homestead, the home of a local family who grows much of their own food based on ecological principles. While we go to these events because they’re fun, it’s much more than that. I bring my family to these events so we can have a little glimpse into a possible potential, beautiful future. That’s because these kind of community events embody social and environmental sustainability to me.

Sustainability has become such a buzzword it’s easy to lose the true meaning. Companies sell us “green living” via labels on products that promise they will be safer for your family. (Never mind anyone else’s family.) But to create a just world that offers opportunities to all people in a way that’s environmentally sound, we have to go deeper.

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How to Talk to People Who Disagree With Your Parenting or Lifestyle Choices

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 5 Comments

How to Talk to People Who Disagree with Your Parenting or Lifestyle Choices. Have family & neighbors questioning what you're choosing for your family? Try these science-based tips to help reduce conflict while still stating your mind. (Photo: A set Thanksgiving table.)

Sitting around the Thanksgiving table, I struggled to describe my job to my conservative aunt and her even more conservative neighbor. I wasn’t in the mood at the moment for a throw-down on climate change. More importantly, I wanted them to see my job – telling people about fuel-efficient and electric cars – as a good thing.  I finally settled on the energy security angle.

“I tell people about how they can use less oil in their cars. Eventually it’s going to run out, so it’s best if we can use as little as possible,” I explained.

“Well, you know, some of those old oil things, they go back to and there’s more there,” the neighbor responded.

My husband started to say something like, “Well, sometimes there is more there that they just didn’t get the first time.”

But then she continued, “Oil has to build up faster than scientists say it does to get the amount we have, since the world’s only 8,000 years old.” I was so surprised that I had nothing to say. To put it lightly, that’s a very rare situation for me.

While this conversation was about science and my job, it could have easily been about parenting choices, green living, or politically progressive points of view. Eating a vegetarian diet, choosing not to use time-outs on your stubborn or strong-willed kid, or attending a climate change rally with your family are even more likely to draw unwanted commentary. It’s easy to want to avoid people who hold radically different perspectives, but that’s not always possible. Plus, if a topic is near and dear to your heart, you may want to try to change their mind on a topic, even if you have to talk people who disagree on it.

Here’s some tips for talking to people who disagree with your parenting, lifestyle or just point of view. Most of this is from the social science literature, so I’ve tried to link to good summaries of that literature when possible. Just as a warning – this may not be relevant for all situations. There may be times when you want to straight-up call someone out, like if they tell a racist or sexist joke.

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Why White Parents Must Confront White Supremacy

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Why White Parents Must Confront White Supremacy (Photo: Sign saying "The answer to whether we'd have marched in the civil rights era is whether we're marching in this civil rights era")

Content warning: Racism, racially-based violence

When I was a teenager in the late 1990s, I thought I was born in the wrong time. In my mind, I should have been coming of age in the 1960s, the height of the Civil Rights era. I imagined myself as a fierce crusader for the rights of others, on the front lines of the marches and sit-ins to confront white supremacy.

Dear Lord, I was a fool.

Admittedly, that’s pretty common among teenagers. But this was a special kind of foolishness. One that seems especially relevant in this rather terrible time in our nation’s history. Almost fifty years after Martin Luther King’s death, a white supremacist in Charlottesville plowed a car into a group of anti-racist protestors. He killed one person and injured 19 others.

To me, this incident highlights how ignorant I was back then. It also illustrates how common my views still are. My naivety illustrates everything about why white parents need to talk to their kids about white supremacy. (By which I don’t mean just Nazis, but the cultural aspect of valuing white people and culture above all others.)

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Here’s What We Should Do About Phthalates in Mac and Cheese Instead of Food Shaming Parents

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 4 Comments
What We Should Do About Phthalates in Mac and Cheese. (Photo: Rows of boxes of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese on a shelf.)

Photo courtesy of Mike Mozart on Flickr.

“So now we can’t eat mac and cheese. Is there anything we can feed our kids?!” That was the cry heard across the land from moms and dads who read the Scary Mommy or New York Times articles on phthalates in mac and cheese.  Both of the articles are based on a report put out by a coalition of environmental groups concerned about toxic chemicals in processed food. (If you want to be super data-geeky, here’s the actual data.)

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A Call to Action for Parents on Climate Change

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 2 Comments

A Call to Action for Parents on Climate Change; Photo: Painting of the Lorax in front of the White House

As I scrolled through Facebook the day President Trump announced America was leaving the Paris accords to address climate change, I couldn’t do anything but sigh and shake my head. As a long time climate change activist, I increasingly identify with the climate scientists sinking into despair the same way the West Antarctic ice sheet is. As there was nothing else I could do, I posted a screenshot of the Weather Channel that made me laugh. That evening, I stood out on my back deck, stared at the stars, and wondered what the hell we’re doing to our children’s future.

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