The Climate Crisis and Young People’s Oppression
My eleven-year-old daughter has recently been advocating for herself and helping me notice the ways I perpetuate young people’s oppression. I think she has always been doing this, but I haven’t always been listening.
She is fiercely angry about the ways young people are treated and is also angry and worried about climate change. We’ve recently had record-breaking heat and wildfires in our state.
With her and my Co-Counselors’ help, I am looking closely at how I, as a young person, was impacted by the oppression of young people and other forms of oppression and rethinking how to act in relationship with my daughter. I’m trying to see her as her own person who knows best what she needs; not as someone I have to, or get to, control or even as someone I am responsible for teaching.
The pandemic has thrown so many routines out the window that we’ve had to totally rethink our lives. Fortunately, the disruption has also disrupted the oppressive foundations on which the routines have rested, without examination. Or maybe, with the routines out of the way that have masked and held in place the oppressive patterns, the patterns themselves have been brought to light for us to examine.
Below is a letter I am trying to have published in a local magazine that has an issue focused on “climate.” In the letter I share an example of how I have regularly been an agent of young people’s oppression—through the assumptions I make about what my daughter would or should want, or how she should act—and how I haven’t been working with her as a partner, supporting her in her own decisions.
It’s tricky [difficult and confusing] to do something different when parents’ oppression and other oppressions are coming at us and we are just trying to survive. However, I’m trying my best to slow down and make space for more conversations with my daughter in which I ask her directly what she needs and wants for herself, while trying to be as creative and resourceful as I can in helping us both meet our needs.
Each time a struggle comes up and it seems like only one or the other of us can get what we need, I try to remember that the needs of a parent and a child are never in irresolvable conflict. The true conflict is between us as a team and the oppressive society. Given this truth, I sometimes need to rethink things.
I am sending love to all of you fellow parents—please “love yourselves up”! Between us and our children there is so much hope and room for growth away from an oppressive society, especially when we can support and trust our children to lead.
Here is the letter I wrote:
Recently, my daughter had a friend over.
Or, more accurately, I assumed my daughter would be interested, and I wanted to reciprocate the care another family had provided. I also genuinely enjoy my daughter and her friend, so I was glad about having them both around. The invitation clearly had much more to do with me than with my daughter, whose consent I had never explicitly sought.
Conflict arose when my daughter and her friend realized they had different comfort levels regarding COVID safety and activities. Each was struggling with their feelings, but what I was most worried about was how my daughter was not being “nice” to her friend. I was upset when her behavior didn’t look like my definition of “nice,” which is apparently just putting aside one’s feelings. Instead of trusting the two of them and asking what kind of support they needed to work through the conflict, I placed pressure on my daughter to “be nice.” This intensified the conflict—now she had pleasing me to worry about, too.
I can think of no clearer example of a form of oppression called “adultism.” Here is one definition of it, written by self-directed-education activists September James and Bria Bloom: “The assumption or belief that adults are inherently more capable than, smarter than, know more than, or have the right to make decisions for younger people, simply because of their age and the social construction of childhood and adulthood in our society, which leads to relational and systemic oppression of young people in all aspects of society.”
Multiple times in the last couple of years, my daughter, clearly holding in amounts of fear and rage that she shouldn’t have to hold, has asked me, “Do you think the world will end and we’ll die before I get a chance to grow up?” What good will niceness do her in a world that is not acknowledging her right to a life on this planet? Niceness is not the most useful tool in dealing with any conflict, including the climate crisis.
In not seeking my daughter’s consent, not respecting her autonomy, and attempting to censor and police her responses, how different am I from the corporations and governments that decide, without the consent of the people who have traditional rights to the land and are its stewards, to build destructive pipelines and use force to suppress those people defending the land?
Responding to the climate crisis requires changing the climate of “adultism” we expect young people to live with.
USA
(Present Time 205, October 2021)