Claim OwnershipClimate Anxiety and the Kid Question
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© Jade Sasser 2023
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Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question takes a deep dive into exploring all of the emotions that come along with the climate crisis, from eco-anxiety, grief and fear, to motivation, optimism, and excitement. Join us as we explore these emotions and delve into the complicated questions they raise around whether, when, and why we are birthing and/or raising children (or not) in this climate-altered landscape. How do you feel about the climate crisis? Do your climate emotions shape your decisions about being, or becoming a parent? Whatever your experience, there’s something for you in this podcast. Let’s get into it!
19 Episodes
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In this, the final (!) episode of the podcast, I talk to Elizabeth: a mother, climate activist, and mental health researcher. All of those roles come together for her in important ways in everyday life, and she has thoughts to share on how other parents can become engaged in climate activism, even if they have no free time. Thanks for listening for the past 2 seasons! For more discussion on this topic, please read Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question: Deciding Whether to Have Children in an Uncertain Future (UC Press, 2024).
In this episode, I talk to Maksim about climate change-related mental health, the goal of climate cafés, and why brining one's full intersectional identity to the issues is so important. We also explore the intersectionality of the kid question.
In this episode, I talk to Britt, a climate mental health expert and new mother. She helped me form my earliest understanding of climate emotions and mental health impacts, and how they intersect with reproductive anxieties. And she has wisdom to impart about how to manage climate emotions, and why having a child is her way of committing to joy and rejecting fear.
This is a brief trailer to announce my new book: Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question: Deciding Whether to Have Children in an Uncertain Future, now available everywhere you buy books. To receive 30% off, purchase at www.ucpress.edu, and enter the code UCPSAVE30.
In this episode, I talk to Natalie, an 18 year old college student and climate justice activist. She talks about navigating climate despair through her connections to nature and other climate activists, as well as maintaining a sense of optimism about having children in the future.
In this episode, I talk to Aaliyah, a new stepmother who draws on her Sustainability Studies degree and indigenous heritage to forge her approach to stepparenting, now and in the future. Also: I advertise my new book: Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question: Deciding Whether to Have Children in an Uncertain Future (out April 9th).
In this episode, I talk to Denise, who is a city council member and new mother. She breaks down how she developed more awareness of (and anxiety about) climate change and air quality issues when she became a mother, and how she is using her position in local government to effect change.
In this episode, I talk to Finn, an 18-year old climate activist and high school student, about why all generations should step up to the climate fight, and the need to move past struggle narratives and find ways to create strong, intentional communities, with or without children.
In this episode, I speak with 9-year old Olivia about her climate concerns and everyday actions she things people should take to address it. I also talk to her mother, Victoria, who discusses the challenges of parenting in the midst of children's increasing climate anxiety.
In this first episode of Season 2, I talk to Jenni, a climate aware therapist, researcher, and mother. We discuss her efforts to become a mother while navigating her climate anxiety, and how she works to raise her child with as much age appropriate climate awareness as possible. We also discuss her research on other parents navigating climate anxiety. Her co-authored article can be found here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4524397
Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question is back for Season 2! Listen to the trailer here.
In the final episode of the season, I talk to Cindy, a young activist who co-organizes climate cafes in Southern California. In these spaces, artists, activists, and others come together to talk through their climate emotions—and an unexpected emotion has surfaced multiple times: joy. The joy comes through building networks of care, community, and connection, which Cindy says is also vital to the conversation about having children.
In this episode, I talk to Grace, a hydraulic engineer living and working in New Orleans. Her climate anxiety comes from having lived through hurricane disasters, and having a job that keeps her up to date on the scientific projections of what’s to come. However, that doesn’t mean she doesn’t plan to have children. Instead, she’s clear that knowledge and preparation can be the best tools for being confident about becoming a parent in the climate crisis.
In this episode, I talk to Kamillah, a recent university graduate who connects her feelings about environmental problems directly to the environmental injustices she’s experienced living in the Bay Area and Southern California. She’s not planning to have kids right now, but she definitely wants them in the future—which makes it all the more important to address toxic air, water, and other environmental health concerns.
In this episode, I talk to Cameron, who grew up as an only child in New Jersey. He and his friends talk a lot about the future and how they want to do things differently, particularly when it comes to creating families and communities. He’s concerned about how hard it is to raise children in general, and says that climate change complicates his vision of a future where he could have kids and raise them the way he would want to. The subject is finding its way into more areas of his life—like his art, and his dates.
This episode was recorded in early 2022. My guest Jessica situates her lack of desire to have kids in a broader policy landscape that makes individuals and families responsible for the failures of a weak social safety net in the U.S. And then there’s climate change, which makes it all seem even more bleak. But she’s clear that this is not an individual problem; it is a system-level problem, and it requires system-level solutions.
In this episode, I talk to Aishah-Nyeta about her experience growing up as a young activist in the climate movement, and how she connects her climate activism to the need for mental health care, particularly for communities of color. She also talks about her reproductive ambivalence—and why adoption might be the route for her.
This episode explores what it’s like to raise children while steeped in climate emotions. Sarah, an environmental studies professor, talks about what she learned from her students about climate anxiety, her own feelings about climate change, and how motherhood has brought her face to face with her own privilege.
Welcome to Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question! This is a podcast about all of the thorny emotions that come along with the climate crisis—from anxiety and sadness to motivation and hope—and how they are shaping fundamental questions about whether, when, and how to have children. Let’s get into it!
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