Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, took to Twitter on May 7 with a brief message for her young followers. Sharing a link to a Scientific American article about a study looking into whether children can change their parents’ views on climate change, AOC wrote, with a winky face, “Call your parents.”
The article opens with the impact of climate protest icon 16-year-old Greta Thunberg from Sweden. Scientific American quotes something Greta had told The Guardian in March: That before she was inspiring a global movement of climate strikers, she was trying to convince her folks.
“After a while, they started listening to what I actually said,” she explained in that interview. “That’s when I kind of realized I could make a difference.” Greta went on to say that that realization helped bring her out of a depression created by the realities of climate change and helped spur her internationally known activism.
Scientific American goes on to point out that Greta isn’t the only kid who can have this kind of impact on their parents. A new study, published May 6 in Nature Climate Change, found that children talking to their parents about climate change is a “promising pathway” to cutting through the confusing opposition to climate change intervention.
“The collective action that is required to mitigate and adapt to climate change is extremely difficult to achieve, largely due to socio-ideological biases that perpetuate polarization over climate change,” the study’s authors wrote in their abstract, breaking down academically how hard it is to get people to agree climate change is an issue. “Because climate change perceptions in children seem less susceptible to the influence of worldview or political context, it may be possible for them to inspire adults toward higher levels of climate concern, and in turn, collective action.”
Recent polling indicates that a lot of young people are concerned about climate change, and this new study found that young people may be poised to influence parents and older folks who might be more skeptical.
“Child-to-parent intergenerational learning — that is, the transfer of knowledge, attitudes, or behaviors from children to parents — may be a promising pathway to overcoming socio-ideological barriers to climate concern,” the abstract continues. The study’s authors evaluated parents of students in North Carolina to see if using children to educate adults about climate change could be effective.
“Parents of children in the treatment group expressed higher levels of climate change concern than parents in the control group,” the authors wrote, explaining that parents whose kids talked to them about climate were more worried than those who didn’t. “The effects were strongest among male parents and conservative parents, who, consistent with previous research, displayed the lowest levels of climate concern before the intervention. Daughters appeared to be especially effective in influencing parents. Our results suggest that intergenerational learning may overcome barriers to building climate concern.”
The takeaway? Young people, and especially young women, may be the best communicators on the planet when it comes to making adults see the devastating potential of climate change — especially when it comes to conservative dads.
Greta may be subject zero in this respect, but she’s hardly the only one trying to get the grown-ups to wake up now. Her school strikes helped spark a massive, global day of action in March. Youth-led climate movements have a long history, and now there’s science to back up the idea that they can make adults listen.
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