My kids and I have a variation of the same conversation about once a week.

“Dad, how come you never drive us to school?” / “All our friends get driven.” / “Why do you always make us walk?” / “But it’s a blizzard/pouring rain/tornado/-35° out there!”

My answer is always the same:

“Walking is good for the planet and good for you.”

I know. I’m that parent.

But something interesting happened when my oldest kid started the conversation again last week; my youngest answered for me. She’s been learning about ways to care for the earth in her class and they were taking a tally on how many kids drive, roll, or walk to school. She was able to make a connection between a value we’re trying to live by and what her class was teaching.

She was also super excited to walk home in the pouring rain that week. It’s a small win but I’ll take it.

The whole thing got me thinking about what “sticks” when it comes to parenting and how we talk about things that really matter with our kids. It really is less about those one-off conversations that can feel really big and important; and instead is more about the regular and consistent conversations that add up over time. It’s also what we communicate through our actions and habits. What sticks is the aggregate.

The end of the world is a popular narrative archetype. Many movies, shows, books, and video games have capitalized on this. There’s a particular sub-genre though that seems to have a particular resonance; surviving an apocalyptic wasteland with a child in your care (see, The Last of Us). It’s easy to see why it connects with people; there’s an added layer of tension that comes with bringing a kid into a survival scenario. You care about their safety, but also their future. It’s not enough for them to make it through just one moment of danger, it’s about who they need to become to make it through them all. It’s about them picking up the skills and instincts necessary for them to survive. It’s about what sticks.

Parenting in the apocalypse is a rough gig.

This isn’t a thought piece on climate despair. As Rebecca Solnit says, “the emergency is not over. The outcome is not decided. We are deciding it now.” (Not Too Late) I am not saying that we need to teach our kids how to survive a nightmarish wasteland. Probably I'm not...

The thing about putting a parenting dynamic into the centre of these stories of societal collapse is that even though it increases tension in the present, it also raises the possibility of building a better world in the future. It’s not enough to teach kids how to survive if you can’t also teach them how to love and be loved. As the brilliant novel (and show) Station Eleven put it, “Survival is insufficient.”

Parenting kids in the age of the climate crisis is about holding all these tensions together. We need to help our kids adopt more sustainable ways of living than we likely had growing up. We also need to protect them in the present and make sure that they feel safe. And we need to teach them how to love and be loved, to notice and care for all living things, to see beyond their self-interest and to help us build a better world. I hope it all sticks.

Walking with my kids has become one of the main ways I get to try and build that aggregate. We get 20 min together before and after school to talk about our days, notice things in our neighbourhood that we wouldn’t see if we drove by them, learn how to prepare for the weather, and stop and play at the park on the way home.

Amazingly, at the park they no longer care how extreme the weather is. I sometimes do though… 🥶

† Note, this is a piece I wrote for an environmental activism newsletter a couple years ago.