Use Your Words: A Mom and Early Childhood Educator Explains What She Learned About Managing Her Fear of the Climate Crisis 

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• Fin and Naomi studying a monarch butterfly

Feeling overwhelmed by the looming threat of climate change? You might be suffering from climate or eco-anxiety. The newish term encompasses both specific concerns, such as relentless heat waves and droughts, and general distress over mass extinction and an uninhabitable planet.

My own climate anxiety ratcheted up in 2017. Before the pandemic, we were already spiraling at a breakneck pace through natural disasters and man-made catastrophes — waves of refugees, bitter social divisions and hate were seemingly on the rise worldwide.

I was living in Vermont's wet green mountains with my husband and toddler, closely following news of the alarming wildfires in California, my childhood home. For weeks, my beloved redwood groves and vineyard communities burned while my loved ones slept in shifts with evacuation bags at the door.

And yet for many folks around me in Vermont, the climate crisis still felt far away. In the dissonance between what they couldn't imagine and what I couldn't stop imagining, I began to feel a deep sense of isolation and desperation. Not surprisingly, this affected my parenting.

My climate anxiety showed up as doom-scrolling on my phone, insomnia, distraction, irritability and frequent crying — or, more aptly, intrusive crying. I'd be OK, making breakfast or reading bedtime stories, and then suddenly I'd be choking on tears.

It was hard to be fully present for my 4-year-old during that time. For example, when he chattered excitedly about the rainforest — his new obsession, which coincided with a tsunami of wildfires in the Amazon — I'd shut down. Usually, I latch onto his interests and encourage them to support his growth and development, but I couldn't match his enthusiasm for the topic.

Another example: I couldn't stay present with my family during special occasions like winter holidays, consumed as I was with worry for climate refugees and asylum seekers trapped along the southern U.S. border. Regardless of whether I managed to seem fine to everyone else, I wasn't authentically accompanying my loved ones in joy and connection.

The cumulative effect of my anxiety was a pervasive sense of stress that made it hard for me to show up as my best self, particularly during the daily moments of mundane parenting challenges, such as a tricky morning transition. The whole process of dressing a toddler, finding my keys and remembering to bring all the things became messier and more fraught when my subconscious was simultaneously questioning my child's odds in a future of scarcity and conflict.

Early childhood experts know that young children develop skills to regulate their emotions through the experience of processing big feelings with their primary caregivers. We do it aloud with them — by pausing and breathing to still any unhelpful impulses, naming emotions, interpreting the situation with balance, practicing apologies — and we also model it as we process our own big feelings.

So what did my struggle to regulate my climate anxiety mean for my child, and what could I do about it?

I set out to explore this question last year through a fellowship with Vermont's Association for the Education of Young Children, a professional organization for early childhood educators, focused on the subject of young children and our planet. The journey brought me to Good Grief Network, a nonprofit that creates "spaces to gather in community, process the painful feelings and realities of our time, and commit to meaningful action."

I joined one of GGN's online support groups and began spending a couple of hours each week with 12 other parents for guided discussions about ways to understand and manage our emotions and actions in relation to climate change, parenting and stewardship. There, I learned to think about emotional regulation as a kind of hinge.

The hinge theory, according to GGN facilitator Kristin Klingelhofer, basically goes like this:

In our brains we have the limbic system, which keeps track of whether we are safe, and the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for higher-order thinking and learning. The limbic system gets priority. If it senses danger, it cuts off the circuit to the prefrontal cortex, which can send us into flight/fright/freeze mode — also referred to in the theory as "flipping your lid."

To close the lid and reconnect the prefrontal cortex, we need to strengthen the hinge. The goal is to make the act of closing the lid, or returning to regulation, feel more familiar. A strong hinge would enable me to accept the full range of my feelings instead of being paralyzed by them.

In fact, the hinge is our built-in healing mechanism. Experiencing and expressing our feelings in appropriate ways allows us to move through them. What does it look like to strengthen one's hinge? For adults, it means finding spaces to process our vulnerable feelings with other adults or by ourselves, whether we need to cry, talk, make art, physically move or meditate.

These are things we need to do without our children so that we're better able to regulate when we're with them. If we give these things to ourselves, then we're more available to give our children loving limits within which they can release their pent-up feelings and return to their connected brains.

According to Klingelhofer, this approach to understanding regulation will help us raise children who will be better able to cope with the uncertainty of climate change.

It's not that kids won't experience distress. They will — they're living in the same world we are. "The goal can't be that we avoid hardship; that's too fragile," she says. "The goal is that, with this way to help children heal and get back to their brain, it will help them be resilient, empathetic, creative, clear-thinking people who can plan long-term and even be joyful in the face of it."

"They'll flip their lids," she adds, "but after borrowing our calmness in the moment so many times, they'll learn to access their own over time." That's how working through our climate anxiety can help our kids learn to manage their own.

"This is some of the deepest activism we can be doing as parents, as early childhood educators," Klingelhofer says. "This is laying the groundwork that is going to be so important for whatever we're going to be facing in the future. I would call it climate activism."

For me, the thought that by working on my own regulation skills I'm doing something important to help the children in my care deal with a future of climate change makes me feel better, and less anxious. For now, I'm focusing less on fear about passing anxiety to children and more on hope to nurture their regulation skills by tending to my own. 

Find Alfini's full blog from the VTAEYC Exchange Fellowship at vtaeyc.org/tag/Naomi-Alfini.