
Courtesy of the BBC
by James C. Sherlock
A headline from the home page of Save the Children:
“Climate Change Is a Grave Threat to Children’s Survival.”
Climate change is thus not a “challenge.” Not a threat to children’s happiness. But rather a threat to their “survival.”
That is what children are being taught in many Virginia public school classrooms. Kids, being sponges, have learned that lesson, and are understandably severely depressed about it.
Parents and the Board of Education, take note. That cannot be allowed to continue.
For years, studies have shown the existence of psychological distress about climate change that has dimensions within feelings, emotions, cognition and behavior. That stress has been demonstrated to disproportionately affect young people.
The largest and most international study of climate anxiety in young people was peer-reviewed and posted in The Lancet in December 2021.
Regardless of one’s personal feelings about climate change, no caring adult would want, as revealed in that study, children feeling “very or extremely worried” (46% of children in the United States) or, worse, negatively affected in their ability to function (26% of children in the United States).
None would want near half or more than half of children reporting feeling “sad, anxious, angry, powerless, helpless and guilty” and “betrayed” about anything, much less a phenomenon that is measurable as a current event with which we are dealing but arguably is overstated by progressives as a future prospect.
Climate change can, and should, be taught to children. But it must be done without terrorizing them. That cannot be too much to ask.
Scaring children to turn them into political activists is child abuse per se.
It must stop. Continue reading →