How to do right by your child - and everyone else's with Dr. Elizabeth Cripps

0:00 [Music] hello and welcome to the your parenting Mojo podcast I worked in sustainability Consulting for a number of years and the issues that I used to work on related to climate change have always informed my life and my parenting even though I haven't really talked about it so much on the podcast yet today we're here with a guest who is going to help us understand how climate change as well as

0:31 many of the other social justice related issues that it intersects is already impacting us and our children and give us some practical advice for what we can do about it Dr Elizabeth Crips is a mother writer activist and philosopher and author of the new book parenting on earth a philosopher's guide to doing right by your kids and everyone else she is senior lecture in political Theory at the University of Edinburgh where she researches and teaches climate Justice

0:59 she lives in Scotland with her husband and two daughters welcome Dr Crips it's great to have you here thank you very much for having me yeah and so I wonder if we can start with uh just a brief overview of kind of what is climate change just so we can start on the same page without going super deep into it so what is climate change how is it already affecting us and how will it continue to

1:21 affect us in the future so climate change which is the warming of our atmosphere as a result of greenhouse gas emissions is something that the um International um panel on climate change is very clear is getting worse it is real and it's caused by human action so um the ipcc report has said that we need to cut our um greenhouse gas emissions by 45% on 2010 Levels by 2030 to avoid dangerous

1:54 climate change so that's to try and avoid climate change going above 1.5 degrees C um once it gets above that we're in really dangerous territory cases of extreme weather fire disease floods and these are all things that we've actually already seen happening I mean the wildfires that we've seen in California in Europe um the extreme drought levels of drought that parts of Africa have been dealing with for for a long time now the floods that we've seen for

2:24 example in the UK and this is something that is forecast to get much much worse if we don't to act fast on it yeah and just to be clear the ipcc is intergovernmental panel on climate change awesome thank you and and of course climate change doesn't affect everybody equally right it affects some people more than it affects other people and in different ways too yeah absolutely so I mean the the harms done by climate change tend to fall much

2:51 worse on communities that are already marginalized for various reasons so the global South has already been suffering much worse even within countries it tends to be groups who who have less say in decision making and who already worse off in many ways who are hit hardest by it so it tends to be women it tends to be communities of color it tends to be indigenous communities so climate Injustice one way of putting it is it tends to exacerbate existing

3:15 injustices yeah and of course it mostly wasn't people in those communities who were responsible for generating emissions in the first place absolutely which would makes it such a clear-cut moral problem such a clear-cut Injustice yes so we're we're waiting in to climate as a moral issue and and this is sort of the core of what your book does and of what your your research does which is um we're we start to look at the links between

3:42 individual level harms that we might know okay I'm I'm responsible for not hurting another person and how does that show up in this huge thing like climate change where I can drive my car to the grocery store and you know who knows who that's going to hurt and how it's going to hurt them how can we connect those two ideas I think you you've really hit on what's been a kind of philosophical challenge around thinking about climate

4:06 change which is that when we think about our individual moral responsibility we tend to focus on well I shouldn't hurt people directly I shouldn't go out and run my car into somebody and I should help them if I easily could so you know if if you can the example that's always used is if you could save a child from drowning and it would just you know damage your new shoes then it's just a moral no brain of it that's what you

4:29 should do but in this case we have a situation where it's not about what any one individual does it's to do with the way that all of our actions combine or the systems that we're part of the way of life that we're part of that's causing this harm so we need to sort of expand the way that we think morally to acknowledge that actually well we can share responsibility for these problems and we can have a sort of shared or

4:53 Collective responsibility to act together to challenge them and that might mean that often will mean challenging our governments our institutions and trying to change them rather than just focusing on our individual behavior and I think that's really challenging right because so much of the narrative around climate change has focused on things that we need to do individually and I know that some of the oil companies have been instrumental in pushing this idea that this is this is

5:22 an individual level responsibility but you're seeing it as like how do you see the the individual versus the um the governmental responsibility I think they're they're they're connected but I think you you've hit the nail on the head there and that it really suits big corporations big oil companies governments to present this narrative that this is well this is all about the decisions that individuals make in how to live their lives is is their responsibility and actually what's

5:49 going on here it's incredibly structural is it's very difficult for individuals to make low carbon choices because of the way their societies are set up it would be extremely unfair to leave it to some individuals who happen to be motivated to make all these changes so actually the the thing that we need to do if we're actually going to tackle climate change is focus on on that Collective change on how we can we can work together to bring that about but

6:17 actually changing our individual lifestyle can be an important part of that it sends an important message to governments and corporations so the more people sort of shift towards plant-based eating for example the more corporations to respond by producing more vegan products and then that makes it easier for more people to follow suit so there are things that there are ways in which these Lifestyle Changes really contribute to it and also I think it's morally important not to be sort of complicit in

6:45 the harm if if we can avoid it but I think the priority here has to be well look how can I be part of bringing about Collective change okay and so um kind of digging a little bit more into the example you gave of you know rescuing the person or saving your shoes um I think in in that case it's fairly clear to me what I should do because I I can save a child yes and I can clearly see the action

7:11 that's going to come from it and I know that the thing that I choose to do the choice I choose to make is going to have that action you know that intended effect or not um but I I also read somewhere and I've wanted to cite this forever and I cannot find where I initially read it that there aren't enough resources on the planet for everybody to live in the way that an unhoused person in the US lives at the

7:34 moment and so if I'm talking about the the choices that I can make within this framework of yes that's not enough and we need to be doing other things um but I'm thinking about you know driving less and and eating less red meat and all those kinds of things it seems as though the the suite of options that I have available available to me is not actually going to get us to where we need to go so how can

7:55 I reconcile those two things so I think there's there's a big difference there between thinking about well what can I change or even you know lots of different individual um people in in the UK or the US choosing to make these individual Lifestyle Changes what can that actually achieve versus well how could we live in a way that actually enabled people everyone to live a a valuable sustainable life and and that's why I think it's it's crucially

8:26 important to to keep the focus on well how would we need to organize our society what would our transport infrastructure need to look like for example what would the way that we produce f um food and build our homes need to look like to be sustainable and then of course as you say there is still this very challenging point that says well actually we do have limited global resources and in order to to live sustainably to live within planetary

8:51 boundaries it's not impossible um it's certainly possible to meet everyone's basic needs but going beyond that in terms of increasing quality of life we need to think in terms of of technological changes but also thinking in terms of how we value the way we live maybe putting less focus on economic growth and more on the other aspects of human flourishing like the the experiences we have the opportunities that we have to engage with nature and all those things which actually sort of

9:18 go deeper and say well maybe we need to assess what matters in life slightly differently and then actually we do have a possibility of living sustainably yeah uh and I'm thinking I'm going to forget the exact date but GDP has only been around for what 70 years or something as a measure of of human growth and you know the everything that's valuable in the world um and the the idea of measuring our gross domestic product as as the

9:46 thing that we care about more than anything else has has not been around for very long so what if we just stop using it we started Point what if we just stopped exactly and I mean there's there are some very um interesting I mean I'm not an economist but there's some really exciting kind of economic approaches like sort of donut economics which try and rethink the way that we should assess our economic progress and and work within planetary boundaries and

10:13 assess human well-being more broadly than than just in terms of of GDP yeah yeah I'm wondering about the extent to which you see shame as intersecting this topic and and this has come up in a couple different areas for me recently uh we talk a lot about white supremacy patriarchy capitalism on the show and uh I've I've talked with a listener who thinks that I talk about those things entirely too much and we actually had a

10:38 moderated conversation on the show about uh her perspective on this and my perspective on this and I think ultimately what we got to is there's sort of a sense of Shame here like I'm complicit in this and I don't know what to do about it and so it's easier to kind of Turn away and I also saw that in uh research on boredom for an episode uh on that topic where a lot of students will say oh you know in Australia

11:03 Aboriginal history is boring um in in Germany you know the the history of the Holocaust oh that's boring we don't want to do that um and and the researchers are positing that maybe people are kind of turning away from this and calling this boring because the idea of considering yourself complicit in a way even though you weren't alive at the time that the actual actions were happening in some of these cases um that the the thought of bit that complicity

11:28 is just too overwhelming and too shaming do you see something similar showing up in in the climate change work I think it's really interesting so I the reason I sort of talk um a bit about shame in the book is because I think that when we are talking about these Collective harms it no longer make sense to talk about kind of individual guilt or blameworthiness so much in the way that we would you know if it's one individual

11:51 going out and punching another in the face it's this is the sort of participation in these ways of life which are harmful it seems more appropriate to think about something like shame which attaches to you to do with with you know harms that you're part of or or things that you're part of rather than directly hinging on on what you choose to do as an individual but as you say it's a really difficult emotion to live with and people will often react

12:16 by turning off and I think that's that's something that we see generally with climate emotions they are they're not easy things to sit with their fear some people feel guilt frustration anger and yes shame and there is a real temptation just to to shut them down and to ignore them and try and live as though we don't know what's going on and there I think psychologists can be really helpful I mean they're helpful because they identify how bad that is for us that we

12:44 just end in this kind of process of kind of disavowal or double think where we're trying to know something and not know it and play all these kind of mental games do all these me mental gymnastics to try and make things make sense that we're deciding to do and actually move moving through that facing up to these emotions even though they are really difficult and and working through them to come out with a kind of more of a determination

13:08 or an earned hope is actually a really valuable process but yes you're right it's one that it can be very difficult to do or to encourage people to do yeah and I think I mean obviously your book is about parenting parenting climate change together um and so I want to get super specific because obviously that's that's who we're talking to here uh in our listeners and so you describe in the book a number of examples of parents

13:33 giving their children large numbers of presents for holidays and birthdays uh big tuition bills for private school expensive holidays and I want to quote a bit from the book here and you say when we have kids it's tempting to think that gives us a kind of moral free pass from fulfilling many of our responsibilities as Global Citizens we think it's okay to spend all we have on toys and books and gadgets birthday parties and holidays Sports coaching and job or university

13:58 applications more than that we sometimes think it's what we should do it's not selfish or immoral it's part of part and parcel of being a good parent in thinking like this we make two serious moral mistakes we overestimate some of the things we should do for our own kids when others need us to and in the process we let down the very children we are trying to protect because we're mistaken about what that means in this fragile world

14:23 and I think that this really gets to the heart of how many people who are listening to the show may be approaching this topic and so can you dig into this a little bit for us tell us what you mean when when you're uh when you're saying that that phrase to us that that paragraph So I think there is this idea in the global North and and goodness this is something that that you know I do myself as well we all do that we tend

14:45 to think well being a good parent means devoting myself as much as I can to my child it means spending time with them loving them and of course it does but we also tend to think well the way that we write ly Express this is trying to buy them things lots of toys opportunities think worry about their economic future worry about you know their school and and so on and in the process I think there's a real danger that we've

15:13 forgotten firstly what other people need and that other people still also have a claim on us and secondly well what more fundamentally our children might need because we on the sort of on the first point we're we're still moral agents I mean we still have these what I call about responsibilities as as Global Citizens which broadly speaking come from this fact that you know there is a real problem in being part of complicit in a way of life that's harming people

15:38 that we should help people in need if if we can the kind of basic intuition that I think most people would share and when we become parents and have this special responsibility to these new people that doesn't that doesn't go away and so yes I think we can legitimately prioritize our children over someone else in need if they're both in need and we can PR prioritize you know doing things for our children giving them goods and things over you know

16:05 providing extra things for other people but fundamentally when it comes to a clash between you know maybe giving our children music lessons or something versus helping people who are really a need it it doesn't look so so straightforward to say well actually my special duty to my child trumps everything else so that's the first moral mistake and then the second one is as I say that when we we think about the world that we're leaving from our

16:28 children the future that they're going to grow up in all the and climate change but also things like antibiotic resistance the possibility of future pandemics this kind of ongoing Injustice that we've already touched on in this conversation when we think about that actually it's going to it's going to matter deeply to them that we're turning them out into a world which is incredibly flawed possibly more than it will matter to them you know whether they've been taught to play the violin

16:56 or paid to go go to football coaching or bought 9,000 toys or whatever it is so I think there is this real question of well have we forgotten what it's actually going to what's going to matter most to our children as well as what we owe to other people when we think in this way yeah I mean it and I'm wondering the extent to which you are thinking about this when when you're thinking about you know the viol violin lessons or whatever

17:22 it is how how much does that factor into the daily decisions that you're making in your life and it's no I mean hugely difficult because I don't I don't know exactly what the balance is for different people and that's one thing that I definitely talk about in the book but I can't go out and say well you should always make exactly this decision because for different parents it's going to be a different set of values and a

17:44 different process I can only say well look when we're weighing these things up these different things that will matter to our children and things that we could do for them or that we could do for other people there are some things that we can ask ourselves like how you know how fundamentally important is this to a good life or you know if my child could look back from 2050 at this pivotal moment in time what would they rather I

18:09 have focused on and you know I I don't know exactly what the balance is I try to kind of find some kind of of of way involving you know giving opportunities to my children the ones that that perhaps matter most to them or to me but also you know keeping time and money to to tackle Global challenges as well okay so you're almost talking about like a rubric for making decisions right um and I think that could be really helpful for

18:41 parents um and and I use a similar one as well I actually Ed to teach a a sustainability MBA class uh on life cycle assessment which is the tool to to actually understand the trade-offs between environmental products and the the environmental impacts of products and services and at the end of the class first the the students would always say to me you know how how do you even manage to go through a grocery store when you're constantly making these

19:04 trade-offs and and I would tell them you know I I have this kind of rubric that I use where I'm looking to see uh is the fruit organic or not and it's not that I think organic fruit is better for me it's that I don't want the workers to be around the pesticides but if their organic fruit is coming from thousands of miles away and the local fruit is is not organic then I'm going to buy the

19:26 local fruit because I I think the climate change impacts are far greater on everybody on me and everybody else than the um the the impact of the the pesticides so that forms kind of a rubric that I use to more quickly make decisions rather than getting paralyzed in front of the display of oranges every time um and so so what you're saying is that we can sort of use this idea of uh you know is my child going to look back

19:52 on this pivotal moment and say yes this this was the right decision are they going to uh kind kind of take this perspective of I I this was the right decision to make for me in as I was growing up and for the other citizens of the world I'm wondering is is there any more like any more steps in that rubric for you or that you've seen other people use that would be helpful to parents who

20:15 are listening so I think the the first thing that it's helpful to do is to think about recognize it as as a longterm thing so I think if we try to agonize over every single decision so if you know every time my children want to stop at the corner shop on the way home from school and say I really want an ice cream mummy I start thinking well do I buy them an ice cream or do I give extra

20:36 money to UNICEF or whatever do I read them a bedtime story or spend more time on on activism I think what it helps to kind of think longterm well what are the things which you know I really think we need to ring fence because they're so important for my children's upbringing and for the the projects that matter to us as a family and then you know as it were protect them and and then make space for for these other things which

21:01 are also um deeply important and I think once we do that over the long term then you know the odd decision that goes one way or the other isn't going to be isn't going to be something that we have to agonize over so much so I think that definitely helps um I then think that there are there are things that we can do in terms of thinking about well how do we approach this do we focus more on

21:23 on Lifestyle Changes do we focus more on collectiv and I talk about well you know I think that for many reasons we we have to think about this as a collective but then we can think about well how we can usefully play a part in this you know what what talents do you have what what organizational skills do you have do you have spare money spare time or both or or neither you know what what can you

21:44 what can you actually um contribute and how most usefully can do that so I think there's there's things like that that we can do to decide well what should I do with the time or money i' I've carved out and then as as I say there is this this difficult balance act between the other things my children need from me and this project which is also important important for them and there I do think you know

22:08 really trying to focus on what what children and and us as families really need and will contribute most to flourishing rather than you know perhaps the the things that we're taught to think matter because they're consumer goods which seem really important or you know other passing fads and then as I say thinking well let's try and think about this a long-term point of view of course right now my child's going to be demanding the L latest plastic Gadget or

22:33 whatever but if they could look back how would they broadly speaking rather I had divided my time and energy right now yeah yeah and I think another idea that came up in the book is that that really resonated for me was the idea that donating $1,000 and not that everybody has $1,000 but just as a kind of a benchmark $1,000 for a carbon cutting charity could be 25 times more more effective than the biggest individual level changes you could make I mean that

23:02 that really was a shift for me I didn't know that before um and so even if you don't have $ thousand dollar right that that still an amount of money that you are able to give to a charity that's doing that kind of work could be super super meaningful yeah I mean so I think I think it's it's recognizing that we can do a lot by being part in various ways whether it's financially or in terms of

23:26 contributing our efforts to these NOS or other groups who are who are combining um to work towards political and corporate change and I mean as I say I do think the individual changes can play an important part within that but the the the key goal has to be the collective so if we're you know if we can do both great but if you can only do one then I would probably prioritize trying to bring about Collective change

23:52 yeah and and related to that I think is the idea of seeing how your little drop combines with all the other little drops and I'm sure folks have had the experience of maybe donating to a GoFundMe or to a Kea uh page where you you're the first potential donation to this large amount that somebody's requesting and it's like is this actually going to make a difference whereas if you're closing the gap between all the people who have donated

24:17 and the little bit that's remaining it's like oh my little drop feels really meaningful when actually all those drops are meaningful right that's I mean that's such a good example because it really brings out I mean this is a really important sort of idea and thinking about this philosophically because it's so easy to think well what I do isn't going to make any difference you know whether it's turning down my heating or not flying or whether it's

24:38 going to a March or contributing to to a climate or for that matter you know an anti-racism charity you might think well I'm not going to make any difference but actually as you say one way um the philosopher Julian neki talks about this that you can maybe think about it is well am I going to help to harm and we've got this group of people who between them could make a really big difference and and I'm one of them and

24:59 it's kind of still up for grabs which way this is going to go so I can think of it as being part of that important that important move again it's part of thinking less about ourselves as individuals and more about what we can achieve collectively yeah almost uh very us context but imagining yourself as a swing state voter yes exactly yes yes exactly yeah yeah okay um and I'm also curious as to how uh weird country

25:27 specific you know the Western educated industrialized Rich Democratic country specific the way that we're thinking about this is and this has come up actually uh just in the last couple weeks I've been reading Jonathan ha's book uh The Righteous Mind and again very us focused but he describes taking a trip to India relatively early in his career and seeing how uh other people in other cultures I mean India specifically but also in in many other cultures

25:53 around the world think about morality very differently than people in the US think about it where you're presumed to be an individual and you're uh you are responsible for yourself and not really for very much beyond that um and and I'm curious as to um firstly the framework that you're developing is obviously fits within a western uh eurocentric culture um how much can we assume that translates to others and are there ideas from the way that other people think

26:20 about uh morality that would be helpful to inform the way that we could address it within the context of climate change so I think it's yeah I so I try and start in this book and actually in my other one too to from the sort of Fairly uncontroversial moral ideas so the idea that you know there's something problematic about harming other people is one that would be pretty widely shared across many philosophical and and indeed religious and cultural um

26:48 viewpoints um but as you say that kind of individualist way of of approaching things is is a very Western one and actually there is a lot that we can learn when it comes to um responding well to climate change but also actually to the all the ways that we kind of live in conjunction with the natural world in a very exploitative way which is also worsening things like antibiotic resistance and the threats of future pandemics we can actually learn a huge

27:13 amount from indigenous communities for for example who found much more connected and respectful ways of of living and engaging with nature and who tend to think about these things more collectively so I think there is there is a great deal that we can learn I think I mean it's also I mean as you say I mean I I write very much from the position of somebody in the global North and I'm kind of aware of my own

27:37 privilege so to some extent I'm I'm conscious that I I'm only I can only really presume to speak to people who in broadly speaking the same position because you know it would be utterly presumptuous and inappropriate for me to start telling people who are already dealing with the realities of climate change or who who you know have been dealing with the with gend generations of of racist politics policies directed against their communities for me to say oh this is how

28:02 you should live what I'm trying to say is well as parents who have this privilege who should be concerned for our own children but also for the the victims more broadly speaking of these injustices this is what we can do this is what we should be doing and reflecting on but at the same time I would be incredibly wary of any kind of white savior style approach which says that means we just sweep in and have all

28:24 the answers and solve all these in a kind of white middle class type type of way this should be about inclusive activism listening to the vulnerable communities listening to to the voices of those people who are entitled to be heard so it's it's very much about well how can we reflect on and use our privilege rather than you know how can we just decide what's going to happen yeah and I I will say that was one of

28:46 the things I appreciated most about the book is you are very conscious of your place and and of of not overstepping that and and I really appreciated that perspective that you brought to it so um and I think that that kind of leads to one of the choices that many of the listeners of this podcast have that many people in many other parts of the world don't have which is the decision to have children or not have children um and to

29:10 decide how many children they want to have and and I will say I I mean I don't know how common this is but climate issues were a factor in my decision to have children and there were I mean the other part of the story is I didn't like children so there sort of that part of it but the I would say about equal weight the not liking children part and the you know I I think it would be

29:34 irresponsible of me to have a child part and you know conversations with my husband and those kinds of things happened and um and ultimately we ended up having one and and will not have any more than one partly because I would be a much worse parent to more than one and partly because I want to minimize the impact that I and my decisions are having on the world and so I think my my sense is that this is a relatively

29:59 uncommon way of of approaching the decision to have children or how many children to have when I when I hear when I see people posting in online communities this doesn't really factor into the decision that they're having and so I'm wondering can you give us a framework for how you would think about approaching this decision or maybe how you have thought about approaching this decision for yourself so well yeah I think I can I can do both because what I

30:23 try and do in that chapter is is sort of reflect on it philosophically but kind of think about it what I've done rather than again for reasons that we've talked about rather than sort of try and make presume to make decisions for for other people particularly when it comes to a choice that's so so personal as this so there's sort of three reasons I think why these concerns would play into our decisions about family size so one is

30:48 this the fact that having a child in a country like the ones that we live in is one of the biggest impacts that you can have on carbon emissions um the other is just fear for the world that we would be bringing a child into and that's what we see with with the birth Strikers and some others say you know I just don't want to to do that to a child as it were and then there's also a third one which

31:10 doesn't get talked about as much but actually interestingly you you um indirectly alluded to there which is this idea that actually doing all the other things we should be doing for our existing child or for you know everyone else in this incredibly challenged World takes up a lot of time the more children I have in some ways the harder it will be for me to give that time either to other people or to to my um existing

31:31 children and I think that they're all understandable and and valid reasons I don't um ultimately think that that there are sort of knockdown reasons not to have children I certainly hope in all since I have two um but um because it is it's incredibly demanding thing not to have a child if you want to I mean it would be a huge sacrifice and as we've talked about this is is a collective crisis actually what we do as

32:00 individuals is is only a part of bringing about change and if you compare for example the impact that having a child the carbon impact having a child I think in the states is seven um tons annually I think and in terms of carbon dioxide emissions whereas it's it's much smaller something like 1.4 I'd have to check that in in in France so the difference that policies can make to the impact having a child is huge so again this

32:27 comes back to what we mustn't put all the pressure on individuals particularly in this case on individual women and how they how they use their bodies and it would be very demanding so I think that you know ultimately it's a reason it's a reason that we certainly factored in in making our decision but I don't think it's a knockdown we shouldn't have children um and again the sort of fear for our children's future is very legitimate and very understandable and

32:51 to some extent I kind of worry another reason why I think we owe it to our children to do something about this is that the world that their children would face could really be very dire if we don't and they would be left with this as a real sort of searing dilemma but I think at this point you know there is a third option which is that we have children and we work together to make sure that they have a good World rather

33:11 than you know either terrible world for our children or don't have children um so for me it ended up being balanced all these concerns and we we decided to stop at two children although I would have loved to have more probably would have wanted to have four or things being equal but you know that that seemed like the right decision for us but I don't because different people can value family size so differently for different reasons and often those reasons are

33:39 associated with past injustices so for example I read some some studies that suggested that women of color in the states can particularly value being able to have and raise large families of their own biological children precisely because of the Abominable racial injustices that their Community faced in the past so I just don't think think it would be appropriate fact it would be outrageous for you know a white woman like me to start saying oh well you

34:01 should all be stopping two children that that's just not you know different communities will have their own reasons for valuing family size differently so all I can say is you know this was how it factored into into my decision making but you know different people will be making their own decisions yeah yeah and so it's it's more about awareness that this can factor in right and rather than a prescriptive you know that this this is what you should do

34:25 coming out of it but here here are some considerations that you can use that could impact your decision to have children exactly I mean there are moral reasons here to to take it into consideration but that doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to be overriding for all for all people yeah okay and so I think a lot of this is is really linked to the idea of fairness right and and one of the examples that really stuck out to me in

34:48 your book was your your child feeling horrified uh that anyone might have to experience what would happen if a car's airbags were to break and you said it had never happened to you and you would hope it wouldn't happen to her and and your six-year-old just kind of burst into tears and said I don't want it to happen to anybody and and so I think our children have this really strong sense of morality and a fairness but over time

35:16 through the experiences we have I me we ultimately end up with adults who can walk past a person lying on the street and not offer to help and we can kind of see photographs of people dying in a newspaper and turn the page and look for what else is happening in the world and so it seems as though our culture does a really good job of teaching us that uh we should stop seeing things that otherwise when we were little we wanted

35:42 to change and today we might still want to change as well um and so I'm sort of seeing this as an example of a way that we could learn from our children right our our education system is based on the premise that we know what is what is right and we will teach that to our children and then they will learn it and they will be better people um but I'm looking at this from a perspective of is

36:03 it possible that we're the ones getting this wrong and that we could actually learn something from the way our children are are perceiving this what do you think I think that's completely right I mean and it's really interesting that because our children I mean certainly looking at at my little girl there they have this kind of intuitive sympathy or you know desire that things don't go wrong for their for their fellow humans maybe I'm generalizing too much but certainly that

36:29 there seems to be this kind of of capacity for caring about things very deeply and I think that we as a society we sort of tend to respond by as it were trying to toughen them up you know in in in the way that you know you hear kind of anecdotal stories of of affluent British families kind of teaching their children not to care about the suffering of of animals when they're engaging in in sort of sports in

36:56 the same way that you know you can imagine Roman families teaching their children to toughen up by taking them to Arena to watch the games and and and maybe you know rather than go through this process which as you say we do we we get to adulthood and we we are able to just flick past the stories of of suffering maybe instead of doing that we should sort of stop and think well what are our children telling us in in their

37:17 reaction there and I think there's a lot of other ways in which we can learn from our children so um one thing I talk about in the book is sort of one of the psychological tools that we can use to kind of move out of of climate apathy is is trying to reconnect with nature and that's something that our children can do already they can become incredibly absorbed I mean again an anote with my my little daughter if I talk about in

37:39 the book she just would sit there just watching just some tadpoles wriggling around in in a pond and and would be so completely absorbed and I would just be distracted and thinking about well I could take a photo of her I could put this on social media or or whatever but she she had that kind of capacity to pay attention which is something something that adults could really usefully relearn and of course young people are also leading the way in activism in many

38:03 ways and that's something that I think we have to be really conscious of as parents and and kind of being part of that and and respecting what what they've done and their voice while at the same time realizing it shouldn't be their problem to solve yeah and and what you said about uh nature really reminded me of just an interaction I had with my daughter yesterday where she was at a summer camp and I don't even know what the culum

38:27 topic of the day was but she came home and I said what did you do today and she said uh we watched a dragonfly emerge from a puper and that was just some you know random thing happening on a leaf nearby where she was eating her lunch and that was the thing she wanted to tell about not whatever it was the grown-ups were trying to teach her that day um and so yeah so so that capacity for Wonder

38:48 and excitement over just something super simple that's happening um I think we we have lost we we've lost a sense of play as well and of uh approaching life in a playful way and of playing regularly and and um I think a lot of creativity comes in play and may maybe the way out of some of this challenge involves a lot of playful thinking to bring the creativity that we need to find solutions to problems that may seem

39:15 intractable yeah I think that's true and I think in some ways they're all kind of examples of the way in which that as a society we've become very consumerist very materialistic and are children kind of go through this process which actually is very bad for their mental health of associating more and more value with you know what they can buy having the latest gadget um whereas when they're in their Early Childhood they are you know absorbed in in imaginative

39:42 play and they find you know worlds for themselves in this or they can you know be totally happy just watching a frog for for for 10 minutes or so and I think it is you know it comes back to what we were saying about well what should we really value when we're measuring what a good life looks like yeah yeah and so for for parents who are starting to think about this and thinking but you know I don't have time

40:08 I I the the lens that I was when I was thinking about how do we approach this was a conversation that I had with a woman of color recently that really has stuck with me and she said I don't know if I can fully understand what it's like to be a white person but I think I can do that more easily than you can imagine being a person of color and of course I think she is absolutely right and and

40:27 she said you know as an example I wouldn't have to worry about whether the person driving towards me and my child in the street is going to speed up as we're approaching the crosswalk because they're racist and of course having to go through life thinking about those things is truly awful and is is you know our responsibility as white women and white people to uh to to shift our our thinking and our child's thinking on those things um so that so that uh this

40:50 woman and her child don't have to have this experience but it got me thinking you know what is it like to be a white person person and and the the perspective I came up with was you know I I am relatively privileged right I I don't have an incredibly High degree of stress in my days but I do work with a lot of parents who do and I think that even though we're not worrying about the

41:12 car speeding towards us uh in the crosswalk it there it's almost like all the other things expand like a gas to fill that empty space and and I I bring this up because I think a lot of parents who are listening to this are thinking well I would love to care about other people's children and to do more work on climate activism and climate justice but I I'm at the end of the Rope just thinking about my children like how can I how can

41:37 I possibly do this how how would you respond to that what would you tell a parent who might be thinking that well the first thing I say is I completely sympathize I mean I I feel the same and it's it's so much to juggle being a parent emotionally and actually that it is it is really hard and I do I mean I remember my sister saying to me some years ago when something been worrying about who turned out to be not something

41:58 to worry about she said oh well what will you worry about now and I was like I'll just move something else up my list there's like this constant set of things that I could worry about so we do always we do always have the capacity to do that and of course there are I mean even within you know white people there are huge divergences in terms of of privilege so I mean I I am not going to

42:23 to speak for you know the parent of a severely disabled child who is using you know all of their well I might you know I might try an advocate for them but I'm not going to tell them what to do because you know they have so much that they have to do already for their child and then there's many parents who are really struggling because they're in the squeezed middle caring for for disabled or elderly parents for example and that

42:45 you know that's hugely challenging so there are going to be some people who just don't have either time or money to spare but for a lot of us I think it is a question of moving around priorities and maybe rethinking what some of the things we worry about are because if you know if you're literally in a house that's on fire you don't say oh I'm not going to worry about this because I've got too many other things to worry about

43:12 with my child you you you put that to the top of the list and I think what I'm saying is uncomfortable though it is these challenges these Global emergencies that our children face like climate change have to be much nearer the top of the list than the than they are for us yeah and it's not I don't say it lightly because I know how hard it is but I do think it is true yeah and I

43:33 also wonder if there's space to worry less right like I don't know what was in your number two position when the number one thing suddenly dropped out of favor you know became not an issue anymore but did that number two thing have to expand could you worry about it think about it to the St the same extent you already were and is it possible that you have some now mental capacity to think about some other things like is that is that a

44:01 valid way of approaching it I think it might well be and I think with our with our children a lot of it comes back to this sort of thing well what really matters to them actually there is a lot of um psychological evidence that piling them up with with material Goods consumer goods isn't very good for their mental health and actually stepping back and worrying a bit less about that and more about you know just making sure

44:27 that they have some some time to play and some time with us and some walks with us or whatever can be you know equally or or more valuable so I think to some extent it's sort of reassessing what we worry about in the sense of well I might why am I judging myself against other parents who are buying more for their children for example there are ways in which we can just try and re rethink that and then yes there are

44:51 there are strategies that we can use to try and manage our Worry List if you like C can you tell us as well some of the ways that we justify not doing anything of acknowledging this is a problem out there right maybe it makes it into the one spot number one spot but we still don't actually do very much what what are some strategies you see parents using well I think most people essentially fall back on the fact that

45:19 almost nobody else seems to be doing anything about it so yes there there will often be appeal to oh yes you know there's so much else I should be doing there's also just you know I don't want to think about it because it's just too scary um but I think there is there is a lot of it is just psychological that we are wired individually or socially to think in short-term ways we're taught to think of things in terms of you know

45:43 what's their economic worth we're taught to think of the natural world as just a kind of exploitable commodity rather than something that we you know we're part of and that we depend on um and all of these things give us a psychological explanation of why we do what we do they they they they explain it we have kind of set attitudes and things which which clash with with climate change we think that you know it really matters to us to be able to go on

46:10 holiday abroad for example and that happens to conflict with the the statistics on on carbon emissions and flying and exactly the same way that you know the smoker will just try and and deny the facts on on Tobacco and cancer we we have to we have to adjust one of them to be able to live with ourselves so sometimes it's easier just to adjust the the inconvenient fact rather than than our attitudes but I think the important

46:36 thing about all of these is that though they're completely understandable they are still explanations rather than justifications they are morally you know we have reasons to try and work Beyond them and to to challenge them and to find ways of thinking more longterm reconnecting with nature facing up to these difficult emotions rather than trying to hide from them yeah and and I think one thing when I my book is coming out in September and and one of the

47:03 points I make in it is it's not only parents responsibility to do this work right we need the help of everybody yes but I'm wondering do you think we have a special responsibility as parents to address climate change I do think we have a special responsibility I don't as you say I think everyone has this responsibility because we are all moral agents we all owe it to our fellow human beings to do this but as parents we it's sort of

47:32 widely accepted I think in common sense morality as well as sort of on sort of philosophical ways of thinking about this that we do have things that we owe to our children because they are children whether we think about it is because we brought them into the world or because we made a commitment to them we have this special responsibility for to them so that means that on top of the reason that we have just as human beings

47:52 to care about these things we have this additional motive the fact that these these people who we owe so much to and who we love deeply they need us to act on it and as I was thinking about that issue I was thinking you know there's isn't it kind of ironic that the entire capitalist system relies on the Free Labor of mostly women uh having and raising children and then turns around and says well actually you're now also

48:22 responsible for fixing one of the biggest problems of capitalism as fac has has created right I mean it the irony of that just is like a vice sort of squeezing from both sides yeah I mean it's hugely I mean there's so many ways in which climate Injustice is gendered um that I think it can't be understood without thinking at it in those terms um it's also deeply racialized and I think so I think I mean one thing to say the book is that I am

48:50 very much talking to parents so that doesn't just mean mothers it means Fathers as well H who have and share these responsibilities um but there are kind of gender implications about the fact that you know who tends to put in most of the work about making lifestyle changes or you know how you what you eat and and and the things that you buy as a family there is a risk of kind of putting more more work on women so there

49:16 is is is sort of important in tackling this fairly to have some kind of of distribution of Labor within within the family and interestingly a lot of the C activists I talked to were women but but when the ones I talked to who' you know found a way of making this work often you know they would be focusing more on on the activism but their partner of and a man would be doing more of the other

49:38 stuff to kind of balance it out and I think and that's kind of going back I think to the the tools that we can use to find a way that works for our family a lot of it if if for people who are raising um children in conjunction with another parent there is this kind of well some people can focus more on one thing and and the other person person on more of other things and that also makes

49:57 it kind of possible I think to do this yeah yeah and you know we talked a little bit about what we can learn from children uh through play through creative thinking uh through their views on fairness and and I'm wondering if if we have also in addition to doing this work ourselves a responsibility to raise children who are kind of good Global Climate citizens what are some ways that we can go about doing that so it very much depends on the age

50:28 of the children because you know is going to be very different engaging with with a young sort of preschool child to engaging with a teenager who apart from anything else will often have you know their own ideas and their own experiences from having perhaps being part of this this movement um themselves I think that the sort of key things are empowering children without scaring or brainwashing them so this this is sort of doing a way of of talking openly to

50:58 our children encouraging them to think about these problems and debate it um rather than just kind of laying down the law to them but it's also about you know moving through this process from maybe engaging with nature more with young children reading them stories through to kind of highlighting instances of of Injustice or or talking a bit more about you know the changes in the weather and so on with with older children then getting on more to a to a science and

51:25 politics but I think it is it is really important to have these conversations and one thing again this comes back to to the way in which this is a very kind of intersectional question because it's it's very tempting to say oh I don't want to scare my children but I think actually you know for for a white parent we can say well okay if I don't have this conversation a what is society what are the things that they see on the

51:48 media um that they they see around them even in school going to tell them about you know how how adjust World should operate what women should have what girls should have how children of color should be treated and so on but also you know what are their contemporaries of color actually facing so I mean if if you know six-year-old black boys are having to be told you can't play with a water pistol in public then actually I

52:10 don't think it's too much to say to White parents maybe we should be having these conversations with our children as well so that you know the Next Generation aren't aren't in the same situation and equally if if you know girls of you know 10 or 11 are being told they can't wear certain things at school because you know they're more likely to get attention from the boys then seems maybe it should be the parents of the boys who are having

52:32 conversations with them at the same age so I think that's that's definitely something to bear in mind when we think about this yeah and you have a a list of suggestions in the book and as I was reading through them and you know obviously the ones that you've mentioned here we're not talking about necessarily reading books with preschoolers about polar bears and ice caps it's not necessarily about you know the the typical image that might come to

52:57 our mind when we're thinking about climate change it's a lot about Justice it's a lot about critical thinking um and and those are conversations that we can have in so many different areas of our life whether we're technically talking about climate change or not yeah I think that's true and I mean I think it is kind of there is there is the the sort of bringing in of of the science and the climate science especially as they get older and I think

53:21 that can kind of start more with an appreciation enjoyment of Nature and then mov it at as you Golda but I think yes as you say it's more about developing the the kind of capacity for Injustice For Justice and to recognize and challenge Injustice from an early age and this capacity for critical thinking is is crucially important yeah and so for parents who are listening to this thinking okay I'm on board and and I've kind of committed to

53:48 doing this in my work to to approach it from a you know I'm I'm entry level I'm just learning this is a thing I want to get started and from another parent who's like yeah I already knew what the ipcc was I didn't need you to Define that for me I also want to take a bigger step what would you uh what step would you advise parents who are at those two different stages to take so I think the

54:10 parent who really you know is only just started thinking about this a really helpful thing to start with can be something that the um dear tomorrow project which I talk about in the book D which is to sit down and kind of write a letter to your child in say 2050 and think about you know what what will the world look like then what would you like it to look like for them then you know what what would you like they be

54:33 them to be able to see had happened in in between that I think can be a really helpful starting point um in sort of motivating ourselves to to to act um I think then key things to do in terms of you know wanting to take action is thinking maybe sitting down and thinking well you know what can I do what can I contribute to this Collective effort you know what are my skills am I a natural

54:58 Communicator am I really good with technology am I really good at organizing what what are the things that I can do and then you know what groups are there in person or in line locally or more broadly that I can be part of that I can work with what others can I work with because I think both because we need to do this collectively we can't do it alone and also because that solidarity the community of working with

55:19 other people is really important I think in avoiding the mental health challenges that can can come with for both of those reasons I'd say then you know seek out your people to to do this with yeah well thank you so much for that for those ideas and for writing the book which is deeply practical which is unusual I think for a moral philosophy book so um so thank you for writing something that can really make a

55:44 difference hopefully in in the lives of parents and also in the lives of our children and our children's children as well so thanks for being here Dr Crips thank you very much for talking to me and so listeners can find a link to Dr cps's book parenting on earth a Philosophers guide to doing right by your kids and everyone else as well as her other books and the papers that I read to prepare for this episode at your

56:03 parenting mojo.com parenting on Earth