What do we owe our children? A conversation about our duties to children and future generations
On November 8, 2021, Capita gathered a panel of international experts to discuss our obligations to children in light of the climate crisis. This conversation was held against the backdrop of the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26)—a moment not only for urgent action, but also for moral and ethical reflection. The full recording of this lively discussion (less than 60 minutes) is here. Below we summarize some of its major themes.
The panelists:
Catherine Bolten, a development anthropologist at Kroc Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame who has studied the implementation of children's rights in Sierra Leone
Elizabeth Cripps, a lecturer in political theory at Edinburgh University who is writing The Last Parents on Earth: Raising Children in a World in Crisis (MIT Press, expected Spring 2023)
Cecilia Vaca Jones (moderator), executive director of the Bernard van Leer Foundation and a former minister for social development in Ecuador
Veronica Yates, director of the Rights Studio in Berlin and managing director of the Child Rights International Network
The forest as metaphor: a plea for connection and solidarity across generations
Moderator Cecilia Vaca Jones began with a question that might initially seem odd: “What can we learn from trees?” Veronica Yates pointed to recent discoveries about forest ecosystems: Trees collaborate. They “think” intergenerationally and support not only their own offspring, but other species too. Forests thrive when they are diverse.
In other words, a healthy forest is a metaphor for how we should care for our children. They will thrive in varied, collaborative communities where all members care about their well-being. “When everyone is your responsibility and you are everyone’s responsibility, everyone is lifted,” as Catherine Bolten put it.
Fighting climate change is a moral imperative we can all agree on
The obligation to fight climate change, Elizabeth Cripps argued, is “morally pretty basic.” We can think about it in two ways: “the responsibilities that we have as parents and the obligations that we have as human beings to the next generation.” Climate change causes serious harm, and not doing serious harm is a fundamental moral principle that cuts across political and religious perspectives. “The morality is as uncontroversial as the science.”
The issue of climate change has been polarized by vested interests, she pointed out. But since at heart climate change concerns basic morality that all people share, fighting it should be widely motivating and bridge divides—especially if we focus on our shared love for our children.
A narrow focus on individual rights fails our children
Bolton discussed the impacts of emphasizing rights and individual autonomy rather than the collaborative, community wide conception of parenting embodied by the forest metaphor. This approach places the responsibility for children’s well-being solely in the hands of their parents.
She described the experience of Sierra Leone. Traditionally, parenting in that country was considered a collective responsibility. For instance, if children were away from home, or their family’s crops failed, another family would make sure they ate. Children knew that all parents were looking out for them. They also knew they were responsible in their behavior to all of the parents.
But in 2007, the country passed a children’s rights law that stressed individual autonomy and accountability, shifting the emphasis to parents. As a result, if children were hungry, or weren’t in school, or were getting into trouble, only their own parents were legally responsible. Bolten listed several consequences of this shift. Parents were hauled in front of the police. Afraid of legal ramifications, they no longer looked out for other people’s children. They did not feed other people’s kids, so the nutritional status of Sierra Leonean children declined. Children suffered more illnesses and more injuries. The lesson: “When we devolve those responsibilities to individuals and small family units, we actually damage the ability of the collective to thrive.”
Yates described how, from her vantage in the nonprofit world, she sees an emphasis on individual rights that is not matched with enough attention to collective rights. She views this as an issue of language—that is, a failure to communicate in a way that conveys the importance of both. In her view, NGOs’ focus on individual rights leads to the idea that “my child needs the best education—who cares about the others?” Therefore, “we need to rethink how we tell stories, how we use the language, who we communicate with.”
Cripps echoed this concern about how language is deployed. “When we talk about climate change, we are talking about fundamental rights. There is a difference between ‘I have the right to drive my SUV’ and ‘My children and grandchildren have the right to breathe clean air.’”
Parents’ role in the climate fight: collective activism and support for kids
The panelists agreed that parents must think and work collectively in order to fulfill their duty to their children and to future generations. Cripps argued, “If we take seriously our responsibility as parents to protect our children, we have to protect them from climate change.” The panelists also agreed that this task is too much for parents to do as individuals. Cripps said that parents must ask, “How can we organize, change the system, or challenge norms and laws?” Bolten noted that “activist parents create activist kids.”
The panelists urged parents to trust their children and support their ideas and tactics, even if that means allowing them to miss school, for instance. “These [activities] are not taking time away from the things they should be doing,” Bolten said. “These are the things that children are doing for themselves and we need to support them in all ways that we can.” She also noted that empowering children bolsters their mental health, using the example of climate activist Greta Thunberg, who had been depressed when she came to grips with the climate crisis. By allowing her to take action through school strikes, her parents “helped her address her mental health by doing the only action she thoughtfully considered would make a difference.”
Vaca Jones cautioned that sometimes movements that were ostensibly for children did not reflect their real concerns. She urged adults to listen to children and to make sure that any movement they support represents their authentic interests (which will vary by geography).
We are not giving children the skills they need to navigate the world they will inherit, according to Yates. When they enter their teenage years, children are finding themselves in a scary world they don’t know how to deal with. She argued for looking beyond the traditional skills taught by the educational system and to consider such skills as solidarity or managing uncertainty.
Cripps noted the difficult balancing act parents face between informing children and scaring them too early. They must judge how much to share. She has taken her own children on climate marches since they were young, while explaining climate change in the least scary way possible, trying to involve them in the campaign for change without overwhelming them.
Children are people of consequence
The panelists agreed: Children’s voices matter and we must find ways to put those voices forward. This is a matter of justice. Children will be living with the consequences of climate change longer than their parents will. They have the greatest stake in whatever solutions are developed. They are entitled to participate in creating those solutions.
Several panelists noted that children often know more about the climate crisis than adults do. Vaca Jones and Yates described the positive impact of their organizations’ efforts to involve children in their work; Cripps referenced Scotland’s Children’s Parliament. “If we are able to give children the space where they can express beliefs,” Vaca Jones said, “we can learn a lot more than we think.”
Yates argued for going still further. It is not enough for NGOs, for example, to include children’s voices—there must be change at the institutional level. She believes that children should have the vote. She also urged that we examine how varied institutions take children’s views into account. “We need to think about all the ways children should have a say in what affects them.” Bolten brought up the idea of the best interest of children, noting that children themselves should have a say in determining it.
“It comes down to this question of treating children as people of consequence,” she said. It is not enough to simply allow them into the room. We must ask: What is required to get people to take children seriously? When does participation become meaningful? When do children become integral to the discussion? We don’t have the answers yet. Finding them, Bolten says, will “take a lot of faith, a lot of trust in the brilliance of our children.”
This summary was written by Nancy Vorsanger.