This interview is part of The Reconstruct, a weekly newsletter from Sojourners. In a world where so much needs to change, Mitchell Atencio and Josiah R. Daniels interview people who have faith in a new future and are working toward repair. Subscribe here.
Over the course of my life, I have been part of political communities that placed high emphasis on the perceived future of hypothetical children.
On the Right, “think of the children” is at the forefront of the movements to end abortion and diminish protections for LGBTQ+ people. On the Left, you’ll hear the same rally cry for movements that aim to reduce climate change or increase gun control. The invocation of children holds serious power. It makes us step outside our own self-focused considerations and instead wonder about a group with minimal power and autonomy.
This is not to suggest that the movements that invoke youth are themselves similar. It feels notable that the rhetoric transcends ideology, but that does not make each side equally correct about the threat to children. That said, I have wondered what it means for children to be involved in political movements, not as pawns, but as people with their own beliefs and agency.
To help explore that question, I spoke with Lydia Wylie-Kellermann, a writer, editor, activist, and mother. Wylie-Kellermann has published on children and parenting as editor of The Sandbox Revolution: Raising Kids for a Just World, in her columns and essays, and in her newest book, This Sweet Earth: Walking with Our Children in the Age of Climate Collapse.
In our interview, Wylie-Kellermann and I tried to talk about the more tangible parts of childhood and parenting, particularly as people conscious of the ills and beauties of the world. She told me how her children teach her about jazz, worms, former President Donald Trump, dinosaurs, and more.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Mitchell Atencio, Sojourners: You open the book writing about your dad and your mom, your children, and then in the first few chapters you talk about your sister. Why do you think family is at the forefront of your writing, especially your climate writing?
Lydia Wylie-Kellermann: When I think about climate, I think about who my teachers are. I think about the wisdom of the generation before me and the wisdom of my children. They’re the sort of the greatest teachers that I have.
There are important conversations happening right now around family and what family looks like. And this is a moment of saying, “Family is as wide as we can envision and imagine it. We claim family, claim elders, claim aunts and uncles.”
Family is a form of community. In this moment, particularly with climate change, so much of the work is about building community. Our families are often — not always — part of that community in which we’re experimenting with answering: How do we want to live? What does this moment ask us? How can we imagine into that? What does it look like to do that intergenerationally?
What are you learning from your kids, these days?
They’re 11 and 8 now. So much [of what they teach me] has to do with slowing down. Putting screens away and just squandering time with children and letting that go.
[It means] not worrying about being productive but following them into wherever they lead me. That could be conversationally — what are the questions they’re asking and [following] them as far as they can go. If they are outside, following them and lying down on the grass and watching a worm for 30 minutes. Or getting lost on a trail in the woods.
Do you have anything that you’ve learned recently?
My 11-year-old has found a huge obsession with jazz music. It’s in his whole body. He plays music intuitively. He just picks up an instrument and can play it. He’s playing the trombone, the trumpet, and the clarinet all the time — he wakes up at 6 a.m. playing the trumpet. On the other side, my 8-year-old currently has four turtles that he is madly taking care of. One of them is a three-legged turtle that he found and rescued.
Our house is full of creatures and music — it’s total chaos, and I just have to figure out how to welcome the chaos. It’s amazing to learn things, to go down rabbit holes I never would have found myself in, but they just take me there all the time.
Jazz is a great forum for chaos and creativity.
And that has so much to do with climate change too. How do we help form kids that can live in chaos and figure out how to [improvise]? I don’t know what’s coming, right? We can’t predict what life is going to be like. But we can predict that there will be chaos and there will be many pieces of it that are beyond our control. Raising kids that can live in chaos and find ways to be creative within that makes me feel like they’re going to be
How do you give kids permission to explore widely and create that mess when you know there’s so much “danger” out there?
The more freedom and chances our kids have early-on to explore their limits, follow the things that they’re passionate about, and to wander, the more opportunities there are [to learn] in their bodies what their limits are and trust themselves. It’s like fostering their conscience.
The more exploratory space they have early on, it makes it easier as they get older to trust themselves. If we curate too much for them, then they don’t know how to trust themselves.
I worry about the radicalization that happens for young boys and young men on the internet from these misogynistic, male influencers. And I don’t know how to give that openness and protect from misinformation.
The last chapter that I wrote in this book was on technology, because we can’t talk about parenting today without talking about technology. We’re scared to let our kids go outside and wander, but then we give them a computer where the wandering is literally endless. There is no safety [on the internet.] We need to give them more freedom to wander outside in life and community.
[In my house], it got to a point where we felt like we were letting our kids have too much technology and we were like, “Oh, no, are we gonna be able to pull this back?” We ended up doing a digital detox for two weeks. We said we’re shutting off all of our screens, including ours, except for when we were at work.
And it was amazing. We talked to them a lot about it. The science around dopamine and what’s happening in our bodies. They weren’t happy, but they went with it, and it was incredible to see what they ended up spending their time on. They found all of these new things. They went outside and [built] forts, they were completely different conversationalists at the dinner table, and [by the end] they said, “More kids need to do this.”
Why was it important that you and your partner also participated in the digital detox?
So much of passing on our values and what we care about to our kids has to do with modeling. It has to do with our kids watching what we love and what we value.
And the reality is: We were on our phones too much. I mean, we criticize kids for being on screens too often, but you go to a restaurant and all the adults are on phones and sometimes kids are just looking aimlessly. We want our kids to know that we love them, value time with them, and there’s no other place we’d rather be. We don’t want to ask them something that we can’t also ask of ourselves.
What would you say to parents who feel like they want to shield their kids from the horrors of climate change while they’re young?
It is a very common concern. One side I hear often from folks is, “Let kids be kids.” Or there’s a lot of grief around our kids not having what we had or what our parents had. There’s this [sense of] big loss that our kids are gonna live through because of this moment.
The more that I dive into the changes that we want and need to make around the climate crisis, the more I fall in love with what that life looks like. I don’t feel like our kids are losing something. They’re actually gaining something.
I want my kids to know how to grow food. I want my kids to know how to depend on community. I want my kids to be able to find joy amid pain. I want my kids to be able to honor the dead and pay attention to songbirds. All of these things are hugely transformative. I want them to know how to be in the streets, how to create alternative visions of how they want the world to look. That’s a life I want for them.
This fear around the “loss” that our kids are going to have, I just don’t buy it. I think these transformations are huge gifts to our kids.
The other piece around this question [is], “Do we tell our kids the truth?” I had parents that told me the truth early on, and I’m so grateful for it — endlessly grateful. If our kids get to be teenagers and [then] learn what’s happening in the world, they’re going to be pissed. They’re going to be angry at us for not telling them, for not caring, for not being in this with them.
Our kids have so much more capacity than we give them credit for. The truth will make them angry, and it will make them sad, and there’s so much grief and confusion. But also, it’s important to be able to let kids have those feelings while we’re here to love on them and hold them in it.
The other danger we run into as parents — in not wanting to tell them the truth — is that we don’t know a lot of the answers. Kids have so many good questions. With climate, we just don’t know. My kids have said, “Are human beings going extinct?” And I don’t know.
Part of the piece of resisting fundamentalism in parenting is embracing uncertainty. To be able to regularly say to their questions, “I don’t know,” is so important — “I don’t know. It’s such a good question, and I want to figure it out together.”
Making space for uncertainty and questions is so important, [while emphasizing] what is certain is that we love them. That’s the core. If they can trust in that certainty, that’s where the safety lies — in the love of community, the love of family, and being loved.
My co-editor, Josiah, is a big fan of asking the Mr. Rogers question: “What do you do with the mad you feel?” But what do you do with the mad kids feel? Particularly with how they express it.
You make space for it and you welcome it. My mom was someone who loved anger and felt like it was so important. That’s something I want to pass on — to know that anger is a gift. Especially when it comes to climate change, anger is part of our expression of how we love the world. We love this world enough to be angry.
I want to make this more tangible though. What do you do with that anger tangibly when it’s time to leave for an event or you’re going to be late?
As often as possible, it means stopping and being really present to the anger and letting it take as much time as it needs. Lying in bed for an hour after they should be asleep and just letting it pour out, and not immediately trying to fix anything.
And we can feel anger too. Letting our kids know that we’re angry, showing them our grief and our anger, as a model, is really important.
There is a moment, after letting that anger be as angry as they need to be, to then figure out how to support them in moving that anger toward some kind of action. How can they feel some power and control to use that anger toward justice?
And that can look a lot of different ways, depending on who your kid is. Whether that’s art, protest, or letter-writing. I love seeing what makes my kids angry. It’s just such a gift to be able to witness that and to see who the core of them is. So often for them it’s around climate and the earth.
You named some actions kids can take. What lessons do you think kids have to show the rest of us about how we can put our frustrations, anger, and grief around the climate crisis into action?
My kids can’t vote, but they’ve done most of the other things. In the last year, my 11-year-old has repeatedly called senators and representatives about Gaza. The power of receiving a message from an 11-year-old who is pissed and sad and cannot understand what we’re doing is a different power than I have. It is actually way more powerful.
[My son] was like 3 or 4 when he wrote his first letter to Trump. He could barely write, but he just had this letter in him, and he sent [Trump] a dinosaur of his. [The letter said] something like, “Please be nicer.”
The power that kids have at protests: They add so much beauty and joy and clarity. We have a wall of all of the protest signs that [my kids] have made over the years. They’re hilarious and wonderful and silly.
Lately, it’s all been turtles. He has signs of “No turtle should be extinct,” for climate protests. He even had a Gaza one that said, “Turtles say end the genocide,” or something like that.
The protest note brings up a sort of hitch in my thinking on kids and protests. Some on the Left love seeing kids at anti-genocide protests or climate protests, but when they see a kid at an anti-abortion protest or gun-rights protests, they call it brainwashing and indoctrination.
On some level, I understand this is just a difference in values, but I’m wary of finding tactics objectionable only when our opponents use them.
I think it does come to that sort of question around autonomy of kids and how invitational is that act? And we don’t know, right? We can’t see from walking by a protest. But the hope would be that the kids are there with some of their own commitment, decision-making power, and wanting to be there. But yeah, it is tricky, because it does feel so different — and it might not be.
The last question I want to ask you is about the decision to have kids. I’m sure you know a lot of people are sort of unsure, particularly around climate. What are the questions someone should ask themselves if they are considering not having kids because of climate change?
My first instinct, even before questions, would just be to sit in the grief of that. So many people are in that place. It’s so much grief that we even have to ask those questions. There’s grief and deciding to have kids anyway, and there’s grief and deciding not to have kids.
We need more spaces to hold one another in that. I don’t think there’s a right answer on that question. We’ve got to release that [judgement on others] and trust one another to make this really hard decision that’s so vulnerable and both so particular and so universal.
So, I think questions that I would ask would be: Where are your spaces for ritualizing the grief that we’re holding? Who are the community and other adults that you want to be raising these kids with? Why do you want to raise kids? What are the gifts you think kids will add to your life? What are the gifts that you want to pass on to your kids? Are you really committed to living into the mess of what this is going to mean and lovingly bringing kids as part of the community into that work?
Got something to say about what you're reading? We value your feedback!
