Trading Hope for Reality Helps Me Parent Through the Climate Crisis

New York Times

09-02-2025

When I gave birth to my first child, in 2019, it seemed like everything that could possibly go wrong went wrong. He came out white and limp, his head dangling off to the side. People swarmed into the hospital room, trying to suction his lungs so he could breathe. Hours later, my husband and I stood in the NICU, looking down at this newborn baby, hooked up to wires and tubes.
We had spent months talking about how to protect him from various harmful influences, and here we were, an hour out of the gate, dealing with a situation we hadn't even considered. Had his brain been deprived of oxygen for too long? Would there be lifelong damage?
That night in the hospital, I learned the first lesson of parenting: You are not in control of what is going to happen, nor can you predict it. This applies to your child's personality, many of his choices and to some extent his health. It also applies to the growing threat of climate change.
The climate crisis is bad and getting worse. Here in Oregon, we've endured several severe heat waves and wildfires in recent years. As the impacts compound, it's clear a lot of people around the world — many of them children — are going to suffer and die.
Globally, one in three children is exposed to deadly heat waves, and even more to unclean water. A study estimated wildfire smoke to be 10 times as harmful to children's developing lungs as typical pollution. Researchers also concluded that nearly every child in the world is at risk from at least one climate-intensified hazard: extreme heat, severe storms and floods, wildfires, food insecurity and insect-borne diseases.
If you are someone like me who has children and lies awake terrified for their future, you should not let hopelessness about climate change paralyze you. In fact, I would argue that right now the bravest thing to do — even braver than hoping — is to stop hoping.
'When I think deeply about the nature of hope, I see something tragic,' the Vietnamese Buddhist monk and author Thich Nhat Hanh, who died in 2022, wrote in his book 'Peace Is Every Step.' 'Since we cling to our hope in the future, we do not focus our energies and capabilities on the present moment.'
What does parenting without hope look like? For me, it is living with the knowledge that my two children will likely face challenges I cannot even imagine. It is grieving that I cannot give them the life I would wish for them. It is choosing to act, by joining local climate activist groups and curbing my air travel.
I do it not because I think I can magically save my children from the climate crisis, but because I am fully aware that I cannot. But most of all, it is accepting that I cannot know, nor control, everything that will happen to my children.
I often think of the writer Emily Rapp Black, whose son Ronan died just before his third birthday from Tay-Sachs disease. 'This is what parenting a child with no future has taught me: Nothing is forever,' she wrote in a 2013 essay. 'There is only now, the moment, the love you bear, the knowledge that loving is about letting go, and that the power of a person's grief is a reflection of the depth of their love.'
Recognizing impermanence is the whole game. Loving and losing and loving and losing some more. This is the only way I know how to parent. It's the only way I know how to live.
Last month, as fires destroyed huge parts of Los Angeles, I was in Oregon, at the park with my father and my two young children, pushing them on the swings.
Later, as we walked home from the park, my father told me that when he and my mother first met, he had been afraid to have children. It was the 1980s, and he was certain the world was headed toward nuclear war. 'I couldn't imagine exposing my children to that,' he told me.
'What changed?' I asked him.
'I realized it was arrogance,' he said. 'To think I could see into the future and decide that life should not extend past me.'
We kept walking. The afternoon sun lit up everything in golden hues. My children in the distance: two little bobbing hats. Their entire futures, unknown to me. Out of my control.
I thought of everything my father would have spared me from: loneliness and loss and failure and a body full of microplastics. A world that is both underwater and on fire. Also, friendship and pizza and laughing until I have to catch my breath. Holding my children for the first time. This moment, here at the park, walking with my father. So much that could go wrong. I'm truly terrified of what's coming. But I wouldn't miss it for the world.
'I'm glad you changed your mind,' I said.
'Yeah, me too,' he said.