U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy recently issued an advisory on the mental health of parents. It’s a long-overdue acknowledgment of the growing pressures on families in America. However, it falls short by neglecting a crucial factor: climate change. This omission is concerning, given the escalating toll that climate anxiety is taking on families’ well-being.
Dr. Murthy’s advisory is right to call out new or emerging factors impacting families, such as technological change, rising housing costs, long parental working hours, family structure shifts, and higher academic and extracurricular pressures. These challenges coexist with chronic, systemic problems: inadequate child care, a lack of paid family leave, insufficient health care and mental health services, and a lack of comprehensive income support for families, which are often exacerbated by the emotional and physical impacts of climate change.
This all contributes to an overwhelming sense of loneliness, burnout, and declining mental health among parents. A national survey on loneliness carried out by Harvard’s Making Caring Common and funded by Capita found that a quarter of parents report that a lack of adequate child care is harming their mental health. Coupled with concerns about housing, health care, and social media, it’s no wonder that American parents are struggling.
Yet, even as more attention turns to parental mental health, climate change remains a glaring blind spot. It’s not just the surgeon general’s statement; there is broad silence on the mental health impacts of climate change, even as the evidence mounts that it is compounding a global mental health crisis, particularly amongst youth.
The impacts are both direct and indirect. Extreme heat exacerbates anxiety, aggression, and depression and impairs cognitive function. Extreme weather and displacement can cause trauma. Knowledge and awareness of the crisis create fear for the future, anxiety, climate grief, vicarious trauma, anger, and despair. Dr. Murthy notes how worries about “children’s future” affect parents’ stress. The existential dread of climate change only amplifies this further.
According to a 2022 survey for Capita and This is Planet Ed by the Siena College Research Institute, over a quarter of all adults with children agree that climate change has affected their mental health. In other research, parents describe feelings of moral injury and helplessness, worrying about the world their children will inherit. Parents we’ve talked to are experiencing climate-related guilt, anger, anxiety, and stress over talking about climate change with their kids, unsure of how to help them process their own climate-related fears.
The stress is particularly acute for families in communities of color. Research shows that these families experience higher rates of climate anxiety and are more likely to have their reproductive planning affected by the climate crisis. For many, the cumulative effects of climate change only add to the systemic inequities they already face.
But all of this does not have to be the end of the story. Supporting parents through this crisis requires systems-level changes, new policies, and infrastructure that address not only practical issues like child care and housing but also specifically look at how to support the mental health impacts of climate change. There are a host of strategies that we can implement. Organizations, collaboratives and networks across the country are already helping parents transform their climate anxiety by creating programming and resources to promote fluency with climate emotions, healthy coping mechanisms and ways to turn their anxiety into action.
The surgeon general’s advisory is amplifying a critical national conversation about parents’ mental health and well-being. Instead of retreating into despair, let’s say yes to accessible child care, affordable housing, and supporting, helping, and healing parents and caregivers. But we cannot leave out climate change; a family-friendly society addresses this critical threat to our future.
Anya Kamenetz is a journalist, author and advisor to the Climate Mental Health Network and the Aspen Institute’s This Is Planet Ed.
Joe Waters is CEO and co-founder of the think tank Capita.