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Comment by Biologist123 | Hacker News Reader

The writer says: “[My children] are more viscerally worried about climate change”.

I’m not surprised.

I recently heard from a friend that her 7 year-old child had, as a class assignment, to create a timeline setting out the impact of climate change over their lifetime.

I was gobsmacked, and feel this amounts to a form of psychological child abuse. It’s a serious problem, don’t get me wrong, but having a small child labour to visualize modeled outputs is traumatizing. It’s really made me wonder about how reality morphs into millenarian thinking.

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I’m not sure being honest with children about something that impacts them so heavily is the wrong move here.

Traumatized or not, I suspect teaching children about the problem in clear terms will lead to a better informed generation of scientists, lawmakers, and voters. Hopefully they make and stick to better decisions then those that came before.

I hear what you’re saying, that children should be educated about the reality they find themselves in. If that is the case, and I would say their are exceptions until children are older, then strong guidelines are needed, partly because acting out of trauma is rarely a good idea. Secondly, because a full reality must be imparted including that projections are based on modeled outputs, and modeling complex systems is inherently problematic, there are many problems facing humanity, and resources must be rationally allocated between all.

Sorry but children pre-12 actually can’t grasp ‘clear terms’ so easy when the terms are about something clearly abstract or existential.

They may grasp the idea of death but seldom is it not terrifying to them as genetically it takes a while to overcome the dna-imprinted anxiety of body failure.

So perhaps there’s a certain age before which u are advised to be very careful with what actually is being said to a child.

I've been terrified of dying since I realized there was no god when I was about 7. It's not really anything anyone needs to tell you. In fact, the lies tend to expose the problems of belief systems, at least to rather intelligent, skeptical little kids. I'll be 38 next month and I can't say that it's really gotten any better.

Time to reinvent GOD and eternal life then. Perhaps also time to consult and check whether it's a mid-life crisis, or something wrong with sleep cycles or overworking. I really wish u get better soon.

As a child I was wholly educated in the certainty that my life was in imminent danger of a nuclear Armageddon... Maybe your "honest with children" about climate change is a hint that they're more likely to have to deal with nuclear winter than anything.

Hence: the best preparation is wide skills and can-do attitude, not ruminations on clueless adults' "honesty"?

What do you think?

Among other things, childhood trauma and fear negatively impact learning outcomes. I'm not against presenting accurate information in an age-appropriate way, but it definitely shouldn't "impact them so heavily." I would think by highschool they are more ready for heavier subjects.

When I was growing up they just traumatized us all into thinking our houses were going to burn down all the time and we'd frequently find ourselves on fire necessitating rolling around on the floor. Also, quicksand and outrunning alligators.

Then again, that is the reality they're in now, so there's an argument they should be spending a good amount of time getting ready for that. I'd rather they not be sitting there pikachu-faced when the rate of human migration skyrockets so they decide to just start killing them all or something similarly stupid.

Calling it child abuse is too far, but I think the real problem is that it sets them up for contrarian beliefs in the future.

When I was younger we were put through similar exercises with “peak oil”. Our teachers taught that we were going to run out of oil and the world was going to be in extreme trouble when fuel was so scarce and unaffordable that our quality of life would collapse, wars would be fought, and the things we enjoyed like being able to travel and heat our homes would become extreme luxuries.

Then none of that happened at all and now a generation of people have learned not to trust extreme claims about the future. This has made people numb to acknowledging real risks, which are generally more boring and subtle than the scare tactics used to pitch them.

Child abuse?

They are being asked to think about what is going to be the impact of climate on their lifetimes.

And yes, going from 260 to ~500ppm of CO2 in atmosphere will have an impact on them. Better be prepared.

People like to think that all those crazy end-of-days cults just disappeared and were replaced by rational scientists. But that’s not how culture works. The apocalyptic impulse is still with us, but has found new outlets.

When I was 7, my school had me writing stories where I had to imagine living through the Blitz.

If your friend's kid is anything like I was at that age, this kind of thing is too abstract to really impact them the way you seem to think it does.

I wonder if in a cruel way that's what our biosphere needs. Democracy plus capitalism has proven itself, by virtue of incentives and systems, fundamentally incapable of addressing the topic. "Vote for me, I'm going to make your quality of life worse!", is not a short-term winning strategy in our current world. Maybe we need a generation of angry and depressed children, that grow into adults and are willing to break the proverbial wheel.

That said, I'm not condoning cruelty. All I know is, that if we continue as we were, we will be destroying the world for our grandchildren and a myriad of species [1]. Personally I believe that realistically the question "will our decisions kill billions in terrible ways" is not valid anymore. Rather the question has become "how many billions".

[1] https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2022/09/death-by-hockey-sticks/

May I ask for a hint about where your friend's abused child is located in the world? Also, what data was provided, did the 7 year old have to read the whole IPCC report?

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