Suffer Little Children

Climate alarmism in the classroom, along with over-therapising, is doing our children lasting harm, argues child psychologist and IPA Adjunct Fellow, Clare Rowe.

Good morning ladies and gentlemen. I’d like to start by thanking Scott and the IPA for the very warm welcome when I joined the IPA this year, and for providing a platform on which to engage in this research and talk about an issue that I have been very passionate about for 10 to 15 years. I feel like I’ve been screaming into the abyss about this, and my views don’t have a lot of support in the profession. So it’s been an absolute pleasure to be here with like-minded people and to meet so many of you who have come up to me and expressed your concerns about your children and grandchildren.

For the past 20 years nearly, I have worked as a psychologist supporting children and families across a broad spectrum of emotional and behavioural presentations. And in that time, as you can imagine, I’ve witnessed many cultural and social shifts in the narratives that have shaped childhood and parenting. But few have concerned me as deeply as the rise in climate related anxiety amongst children, particularly amongst primary school children.

While much important work has been done at a curriculum and policy level, including by my colleagues here, Colleen Harkin and Bella d’Abrera, my role is different. I come to you today not as a policy expert, but as a clinician. I am in the room with children. I see how the messages they receive are landing and what I bring today is the clinical lens, how these ideas are showing up in young minds and how they are affecting emotional development, psychological functioning, and their mental health. I’m also the mother of young children who at this point in time are attending my local public school, so I have a vested interest in knowing what is going on in there. In recent years, I have had children as young as six sit across from me in my clinic expressing with certainty that the world is ending and that adults have failed them and that they may not live to see adulthood; and they are terrified.

These are not isolated cases. Colleagues have reported a similar thing, and I’ve certainly heard anecdotes from you over the last days about what you are hearing from your grandchildren. One 8-year-old girl I worked with developed a deep and persistent fear about her family’s car usage. She would cry and refuse to get in the vehicle, believing that each trip was directly killing the planet. A 10-year-old boy began hoarding rubbish in his bedroom, attempting to repurpose every scrap of plastic because he personally felt responsible for landfill. Another nine-year-old boy begged my colleague through tears to try and make the government listen and stop making more factories, to which I wanted to say, “darling, they’re closing factories so don’t worry”. But here is the absurdity of what we’re dealing with. These are not expressions of healthy concern. These are symptoms of clinical anxiety manifested through the lens of overwhelming global narratives that children are not developmentally prepared to process.

These are not expressions of healthy concern.

Now, before I delve deeper into climate change anxiety specifically, I wanted to speak a little more broadly. Of course, the number one question I get asked when I tell people that I’m a child psychologist is “Clare, we know more about childhood development and parenting than ever before. Why are our children in a First World country like Australia the most depressed, anxious, disengaged, and fragile than they have ever been before in human history?” It’s a big question, but generally speaking, these are the four areas that I generally give to people as my answer.

First I say there are cultural and societal influences, that is the overexposure to adult issues and fear-inducing narratives like climate change, gender identity, and so on. Before children are developmentally ready, there’s an erosion of childhood innocence and the loss of age-appropriate boundaries.

Then we have the family structure changing and parenting trends, the decline of the traditional family unit, rising rates of separation, co-parenting conflict. We have an epidemic of over accommodation in parenting, where discomfort for children is avoided at all costs.

Third, we have the digital environment and screen culture. I don’t need to even go into that. I could be here for a week on that one. Forget social media. There is no reason a child under the age of 16 needs a phone. There is no need for it. We are raising addicts, and the biggest threat to your children is not on a dodgy street corner. It is in their bedrooms, through their phones.

And finally, there is therapeutic overreach. I believe my profession and colleagues are over-therapising normal childhood behaviour, emotion and development. There is this idea that every struggle must lead to a diagnosis instead of being just a part of growing up. We have very well-meaning psychologists and therapists who are in fact reinforcing kids’ fragility, keeping them as victims and ever more reliant on the therapist as the expert. So I often say, are our children really mentally ill or are they reacting appropriately to a world that has become developmentally inappropriate for them?

The IPA’s Childhood Climate Anxiety Project seeks to examine climate anxiety in pre-adolescent children, but I’m here to do this through the lens of neuroscience and developmental psychology. Climate anxiety at the moment is not in the Diagnostical and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—the big bible that we refer to in psychiatry to diagnose you all with various things—but it is increasingly treated as a legitimate emotional state and even a morally virtuous one. The medical journal, The Lancet reports that nearly 60 per cent of young people feel very or extremely worried about climate change. It’s important to note that in that research, the study focused on individuals between the ages of 16 and 24. But this group, today’s adolescents and young adults, are the same individuals who were first taught climate change in primary school. They are the product of a decade or more of messaging that casts climate change as their responsibility, their crisis to solve.

We actually lack equivalent data for children under 12, which is even scarier in the way that we persist in teaching climate change. But what I am seeing clinically strongly suggests the same trend is emerging earlier, in younger children, when the psychological impact may be even more severe due to immature coping skills. Fundamentally, climate change is an abstract, complex and long-term issue, and grasping it requires hypothetical reasoning and understanding of probability, the ability to grasp systemic complexity. These are cognitive skills that develop gradually and are not present in children. I would argue they’re not present in a lot of adults.

This is not education, it is psychological overreach.

According to theories of cognitive development, primary school aged children operate within what we call the concrete operational stage. This means they rely on tangible, immediate experiences to make sense of their world. They are just not equipped to comprehend global interdependencies, long-term environmental projections, or the nuances of scientific modelling. And neuroscience confirms this. We know that the prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain used for risk assessment and time management planning, is very underdeveloped in children. It’s the last part of the brain to develop. But meanwhile, the amygdala, that primal area that develops first, is the emotional alarm system and is highly active in children. So we’ve got this imbalance neurologically, that predisposes children to exaggerated fear responses when confronted by frightening narratives that they cannot contextualise. So when a young child is told that sea levels are rising, they may literally interpret this to mean it’s going to happen imminently in their backyard, down at Bondi Beach next weekend. Similarly, when confronted with the messaging that we must act now, and there is no planet B, a child may literally believe that the world will end imminently, and experience dread and panic at this point.

I think it’s also worth noting the inconsistency with how we approach anxiety in children in every other context. Whether it’s their fear of war, illness, natural disasters, our instinct is to protect children, to reassure them and to reduce their exposure to distressing information. We help them regulate their emotions, offer perspective, and maintain a sense of safety. Yet when it comes to climate change, we abandon this approach entirely and instead of reassurance, we validate their fears. We even encourage them to remain anxious as a form of moral engagement. And this double standard is not just unhelpful, it’s deeply harmful. We’ve heard now that the Australian National Curriculum embeds climate change across all learning areas from age five. The National Curriculum does not take into account any developmental considerations or the constraints just mentioned. When children are shown images of floods, bushfires, mass extinction, and are told that this is their future unless they act, the psychological impact is profound. We are raising children who feel responsible for saving the planet before they even know how to tie their shoes.

Children are internalising messages of fear and helplessness. Guilt is another recurring theme amongst children. They feel ashamed for using plastic, for producing waste, for not doing enough. The moralisation of environmental behaviour, framing actions as good or bad, results in children interpreting minor infractions as personal failings. This is not education, it is psychological overreach and it risks impairing the development of children’s emotional resilience, agency and optimism, which are all essential for good mental health. Yes, but they’re also essential for any future civic engagement.

And there’s another issue. Climate messaging doesn’t just burden children emotionally. It quietly undermines the trust they place in the adults closest to them. Many children are being taught implicitly or explicitly that their parents are part of the problem. This narrative reframes parents not just as their protectors or guides, but as obstacles to real climate action. We are seeing children aligning with authorities such as schools, activist groups, and digital media influencers who claim to know better. The effect is a subtle but significant shift. It erodes intergenerational trust. It separates children from the very relationships that anchor their emotional development.

From a behavioural perspective, the pattern follows a pretty predictable cycle. First, children are convinced that human activity poses a grave threat to the planet and they’re encouraged to ruminate on all of the negative consequences that this could result in. Next, of course, these children are distressed, a distress compounded by the absence of any viable solution they themselves can offer. They are presented with a ritualistic form of collective action, such as school strikes, reinforced by strong social validation—which does actually temporarily relieve their distress because they’re doing something together—only to return to the classroom for the cycle to repeat itself. This process conditions children to associate emotional relief with adherence to activist driven narratives. It reinforces ideological commitment and dependence on the collective activism for their own emotional and psychological regulation.

This is educationally and developmentally inappropriate, and bypasses cognitive readiness and emotional safety in favour of moral urgency. I think as adults we forget just how much is happening in the brains of children when they play. They’re not just finger painting, they’re not just playing in a sandpit. So many neural connections are formed on a daily basis through play imagination. They’re not just nice extras, they’re essential for healthy brain development. And when we expose children too early to adult concerns, especially emotionally loaded and complex issues like climate change, I think it can act as a cognitive pollutant. It literally pulls them off track, from the things that the brain is meant to be focused on. It activates fear circuits in the brain, overstimulates emotional centres like the amygdala, and it distracts from the foundational tasks of childhood. So in short, we are interrupting the normal developmental rhythm by exposing them to burdens that they are just not built for. Children should be learning how to read, to count, to play, to navigate friendships, not how to process global threats.

Parents have no idea what is going on in schools.

Lastly, and perhaps most concerning to me as a psychologist, is the role that mental health professionals are now playing, when they reinforce rather than alleviate this distress. In much the same way the education sector has embraced activist messaging without question, sadly so too has my own profession.

Rather than helping children reframe their fears and challenge catastrophic thoughts, many psychologists now encourage children to lean into their distress as a form of virtue. Some even recommend therapy sessions be used to support environmental activism, and who can blame them when our representative bodies support this clinical thinking? The Australian Psychological Society, for example, has published resources on climate grief, eco-trauma, which prioritise the validation of these emotions over strategies to reduce them. The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists is committed to a zero carbon health system, a stance that I think I am the only one calling out. It appears to prioritise environmental activism over the potential psychological harms associated with climate messaging. In no other area of anxiety treatment would we affirm a patient’s fear of catastrophe without helping them develop perspective and emotional regulation. In doing so, we risk encouraging children to remain psychologically dysregulated and with their emotional equilibrium tied to outcomes that they cannot control.

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Because no matter how hard a child channels their energy into lobbying mum and dad to reduce eating meat, to give up the car, to recycle, the ever looming problem of climate change will always remain. And so our Childhood Climate Anxiety Project will, through evidence-based research, make the case for a reevaluation of what we are teaching, how we are teaching it, and whether we are doing so in service of education or in service of activism. Because if we are serious about addressing this so-called mental health crisis with our kids, we must begin by protecting the developmental sanctity of childhood itself. Thank you very much.

In answer to the question: “You’ve been in the industry for a long time. What sort of changes have you seen within the clinic about the type of people who are presenting, particularly children, and what sort of percentage of your business has now moved to this issue?”

One thing I didn’t emphasise is parents, and I’m often asked, “do parents support this?” I think the majority of parents who come along are, like myself, busy running businesses, busy working. So I think the vast majority of parents have no idea what is going on in schools, and nor should they have to be across the curriculum in any level of detail. We send our kids along to school, we want them to learn to read and write and get educated. We shouldn’t have to sit down and analyse the curriculum.

I think that there are parents, certainly the ones I talk to, that are horrified when their child comes home. Now, we can’t eat meat on three nights of the week, mum, and we shouldn’t use the car. There is another type of parents that I see. It’s not as common, and they are very proud of their eco-warriors and they push them forward and say, look how smart they are. Look at my 7-year-old and my anti-Trump eco-warrior, right? That’s less common. The vast majority of parents are horrified and they want this out of the curriculum quickly.

This is an edited extract of an address given by Clare Rowe to an IPA audience in Adelaide in March 2025. The IPA’s Childhood Climate Anxiety Project is led by Schools Program Director Colleen Harkin, with support from Adjunct Fellow Clare Rowe, Senior Fellow Kevin You, and Research Fellow Margaret Chambers.

This article from the Winter 2025 edition of the IPA Review is written by IPA Adjunct Fellow, Clare Rowe.