Talking to toddlers about Climate Change

close up of tree against sky — Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Key points:

· Work with igniting a love of nature through storybooks about nature and simple activities that generate connection with nature // help build values about protecting the planet

· Follow the individual child’s curiosity and interests, exploring what they understand and have heard

· Be mindful of childhood development stages and keep the focus on home and self, but also work on one of their development strengths at this age: imagination

· Don’t overwhelm them with overly complex information, but do have an understanding yourself of the evidence base

· Focus on reinforcing their sense of safety and security, hope and fun

· Watch out for gender stereotypes and norms and gender binaries

· Acknowledge emotions that may arise and normalise emotions for all kids

Background: Childhood development stages

Keep in mind the development stages and what’s happening for kids at different ages and stages. Jean Piaget, a psychologist and developmental biologist, identified four stages of cognitive/intellectual development:

“Sensorimotor (birth through ages 18-24 months) – Learning is based on experiences through trial and error.
Preoperational (ages two to seven) – Language, memory, and imagination develop. “Intelligence is both egocentric and intuitive.”
Concrete operational (ages seven to 12) – Awareness of the outside world and events, and the “logical and methodical manipulation of symbols,” takes hold.
Formal operational (adolescence through adulthood) – A grasp of abstract concepts and an ability to make hypotheses is found, and the use of symbols to relate to abstract concepts materializes.”

https://www.webmd.com/children/piaget-stages-of-development#1

https://www.climaterealityproject.org/sites/default/files/kidsandclimatechangee-book.pdf

David Sobel is a US environmental educator. He talked with children in the US, England and the Caribbean, asking them to draw neighbourhood maps. His findings help us understand how kids understanding of their place in the world. Young children (4-7 years old) put their homes at the heart of their maps, dominating the page. Children ages 8-11 years old start to put their homes off-centre, and introduce the ‘explorable landscape’ – places within reach, but perhaps unknown to them. Children 12-15 years older have larger maps yet, with a broader scope and greater abstraction, and with a bias to social places.

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/04/raising-kids-climate-change/554969/

Background: Understanding the Climate Change Evidence Base

While pre-school kids are not likely to ask you for the scientific details of climate change, they are curious creatures, and so having a reasonable understanding of the basics is useful to be able to give them some answers when their brains ignite. Try checking out these resources:

Background: Gender norms

We start to develop our ideas about gender at a very young age. There are a variety of feminist approaches to climate change, flagging everything from the paucity of women in leadership and climate change science that lead to important debates and community dimensions being missed, to analysis of the impact of gender norms on care roles and the climate change impact. The following resources can support exploring gender norms and ideas with toddlers:

Ignite a love of nature

The Rainforest Alliance takes a lovely approach, developing activities that explore the five senses:
https://www.rainforest-alliance.org/sites/default/files/2016-08/ec_alllessons.pdf
Riffing off the idea of the five senses and their ideas you could explore igniting a love of nature through
- Touch: put a found natural object into a shoebox (ie, a gumnut, shells, or banksia flower); cut a hole in each end of the box; have the kids sit in a circle and take turns putting their hands into the box to touch the objects // tape paper to a tree trunk and give each child a crayon to make a bark rubbing. With the older kids you could get them to use the bark rubbing as the basis of a picture.
- Taste: tastes of the Australian bush // pretending to be Australian animals OR tasting a floral honey // and pretend to be flowers and bees // make s’mores https://climatekids.nasa.gov/smores/
- Sight: go for a nature walk and pick up leaves, sticks, flowers that have fallen on the ground, come back and either make a picture with some of the objects or make a group picture (ie, a face using the leaves, sticks, flowers etc)
- Sound: make a rainstick, https://climatekids.nasa.gov/rainstick/ Sing a song about animals
- Smell: make some paper flowers out of coloured paper and dot them with some essential oils, put on some music and ask the children to dance as bees, when the music stops, be a little bee settling down on the flower, smelling the lovely smells *check that kids don’t have sensitivities to scent
Make seed paper https://climatekids.nasa.gov/seed-paper/
Make a bee https://climatekids.nasa.gov/bees/

Focus on home and self

Make a collage of favourite animals for the recycling boxes at home
Make a picture of their family to go on the recycling boxes at home
Make smiley face pictures to go next to light switches as a reminder to turn them off as they leave rooms
Make animal face masks (simple – paper; fancy – leftover wool etc) and do an animal dance/play activity
Make flower face masks (simple – paper; fancy – leftover wool etc) and do an animal dance/play activity
Set up a simple “grown your own” experiment with sprouting seeds for the kids to watch grow (and who knows, maybe even eat!!!)

Sit comfortably in their emotions and your emotions

Talking about climate change might stir up some emotions, if that arises focus on
- Reassuring the kids with words and gestures
- Address the feelings – it’s ok to feel sad, scared etc, we all feel them
- Use ideas they are already comfortable with and simple emotional terms
- Let them know that some older people are taking care of this, from the super awesome teenagers to their parents/carers (although we know that some adults are actually exacerbating the crisis)

https://www.commonsensemedia.org/blog/how-to-talk-to-kids-about-difficult-subjects