Children and the Climate Crisis
Working with their Anxiety, Anger, Grief and Hope
NOW CLOSED
This webinar was recorded and is now available as a Talk on Demand. Click here for more details.
Friday 21 January 2022
A live webinar with keynote speakers Caroline Hickman and Sally Weintrobe, Judith Anderson, Jay Griffiths, Anna Harvey, and more...
CPD Credits: 6 hours
- Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event)
- Bookings close at 9:00am GMT Tuesday 18 January
Bringing together voices from many backgrounds, this conference aims to provide meaningful insights into the emotional states which are evoked in young people by the environmental crisis. We will explore how the complexity and depth of their feelings – their anger, fear, and sense of abandonment – can be more effectively heard, understood, and responded to by adults.
READ MORE...We will aim to recognise how the current ecological crisis is showing up in their behaviour, preoccupations, dreams, and sense of a future, and to understand their struggle to navigate the tension between hope, despair, action, and nihilism.
The panel will offer interdisciplinary perspectives and young peoples’ views on how the widespread adult denial and disavowal of the climate emergency deepens the burden carried by children. We can see that they are often the most clear-sighted, outspoken, and alive to the subjectivities of the other-than—human. Do children feel and express the pain of the world for many? Do adults find it too hard to hear the child’s perspective and to tolerate their distress because we cannot face reality ourselves?
Asking difficult questions and facing the moral, cultural, practical, and spiritual journey that is needed to transform our behaviour for the sake of all living species, we will ask how adults – who ourselves have to face our own grief, loss, and anxiety – can be most effective in containing and responding to children’s needs in this era. Together we will consider the importance of keeping their interests at the centre of our hearts and minds – in climate emergency conversations, at home, at school and in the clinical setting. Perhaps most importantly, we will look at where hope and resilience relate and reside.
SPEAKERS
Caroline Hickman, Sally Weintrobe, Jay Griffiths, Dr Anna Harvey, Elouise Mayall, Jo McAndrews, Dr Catriona Mellor, Louisa Adjoa Parker, Panu Pihkala, Jocelyne Quennell, Sonia Shomalzadeh, Tree Staunton, Jennifer Uchendu, Judith Anderson, Natasa Mavronicola, Bernadka Dubicka, ,FULL PROGRAMME
Artist Sonia Shomalzadeh will be creating live art reflecting the themes of the day.
09.30
Introductions
09.45
Jay Griffiths
A Reading
10.00
Caroline Hickman
Listening to the Wisdom of Children’s Voices in the Climate and Biodiversity Crisis
“We saw online that people in Iceland had a funeral for a glacier, but we will be underwater soon because of rising sea levels, and the world doesn’t seem to care about this, or about us, who will have a funeral for us?” – Child from The Maldives
As future generations, children and young people have the largest stake in finding solutions to the climate and biodiversity emergency, but so often the narrative around climate crisis communication and related psychological trauma can split between protecting children from the facts or terrifying them by telling them too much. But maybe we need to hold this tension of opposites. Can we find ways to protect children whilst validating and acknowledging their fears? As children take to the streets and the law courts to express their pain, frustration, and despair, do we, the “adults”, need to examine our defences and learn to really listen to them more honestly, to tolerate their distress, to face our guilt, grief and shame and find ways to navigate the new world that is emerging together?
10.30
Sally Weintrobe
Did We Care When Birds and Animals Died During the Sixth Extinction?
Children are naturally close to and fascinated by animals. They are, as Vaclav Havel put it, “pre-political”, meaning not yet so influenced by culture. The pre-political is deeply political. aSally sees our prevailing culture of un-care as working to break links between humans and other species and to invite us to treat them as distanced others. How are we facing the Sixth Mass Extinction? Can children help adults repair their inner representations of the natural world and our place in it?
11.00
Q&A
11.30
Break
12.00
Climate Activists Elouise Mayall & Jennifer Uchendu in discussion with Human Rights Lawyer Natasa Mavronicola chaired by Caroline Hickman
Young climate activists will discuss what it is like to be growing up with climate emergency awareness, intergenerational conflict, intersectional awareness and climate crisis as social injustice.
12.45
Q&A
13.00
Break
14.00
Judith Anderson in Conversation with Anna Harvey, Catriona Mellor, and Jocelyne Quennell
Clinical Discussion: What are the clinical issues for counsellors and psychotherapists working with children and families in the context of the climate crisis?
When the facts are terrifying, adults or parents may not be able to change them in order to reassure their children. Adults may feel powerless, and children may feel that their parents don’t know how to help them. What is the work of psychotherapy and eco-therapy here? How do we work with these real environmental issues taking into account intrapsychic conflicts, interpersonal relationships, and the need for activism, doing something? How do we develop a climate crisis aware psychotherapy? What are the most thoughtful professional and clinical responses to this?
14.45
Q&A
15.00
Break
15.30
Panu Pihkala, Ph.D
Climate emotions and children
Emotions are a crucial dimension in relation to climate crisis and children. People of all ages experience many different climate emotions, but children may feel them exceptionally strongly because of their young age and political powerlessness. On the other hand, many adults who wish to help children sometimes struggle with their own difficult emotions. In this workshop, we will explore various climate emotions and discuss ways to encounter them constructively.
15.55
Jo McAndrews
Deep resilience and embodiment
Meeting life as we have never known it with strength, flexibility and resourcefulness.
Climate change is bringing us an ongoing and evolving emergency. How can we develop the capacity to meet it in a sane and purposeful way? Research from the fields of Neurobiology, Attachment, Trauma and Resilience offer us wisdom and clear practices. They show how childhood is central to everything. This workshop offers a combination of theory, reflection and experience to equip you with common sense practical actions you can take to deepen your resilience in your work with children, your personal life, relationships and the communities you belong to.
16.15
Q&A with Panu Pihkala and Jo McAndrews
16.30
Caroline Hickman
Playing with the move from therapeutic dyad (between therapist & child) to the therapeutic triad (between therapist, child, and the planet)
Encounters with the climate and ecological crisis in the therapeutic space may be overt, subtle, or symbolic. This workshop will discuss developing a practice-oriented climate & bio-diversity crisis lens through which you and your practice can respond to these emerging concerns.
We will examine a range of techniques we can use in the therapy room, at home, in school and outdoor classroom to support children and young people to explore their thoughts and feelings about the climate and biodiversity crisis. We will look at a range of practical and imaginal approaches including art, storytelling, play and personification.
16.50
Implications for Trainings and the Role of the Professional Bodies
Judith Anderson in conversation with Tree Staunton UKCP, Kate Robertson, Chair for the ACP, Jocelyne Quennell, Fellow of the UKCP Child Faculty and Director of Wellbeing at the Institute for Arts in Therapy and Education, and Bernadka Dubicka, Honorary Professor University of Manchester; Editor in Chief Journal of Child and Adolescent Mental Health, Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist; recent CAP chair RCPsych
17.30
Louisa Adjoa Parker
Poetry Reading: Land and Self
End