Tom Elliott:
Now a research fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs. Clare Rowe, good morning. Clare, are you there?
Clare Rowe:
Good morning.
Tom Elliott:
Yes, good morning. Look, I just mentioned, I think every generation has its boogeyman. In my generation it was nuclear war. I remember being at school, we watched a very scary British dramatisation of a nuclear war called Threads and it scared the bejesus out of us, like this is what will happen if we have a nuclear war and this is how bad it will be. For the current generation, it’s probably climate change and environmentalism, but it means that a lot of young people are saying they will never ever have children. Now that’s a bit sad, isn’t it?
Clare Rowe:
Well, I think it’s very, very sad. And this research looked at adolescents and young people, but what I’m seeing clinically is that the fear of climate change is actually with really young kids as well, which is really sad. Six, seven, eight year olds who don’t think they’re going to make it to adulthood. So in that sense, I’m not seeing kids who have any hope or motivated to fix the problems that the world faces. They’re actually becoming helpless and hopeless in their outlook. And I think that it’s significant because having children is one of the most fundamental decisions people make. And when young people start deciding against family life because they feel the future is too bleak or uncertain, we need to start asking where are those beliefs coming from and whether they’re proportionate to reality to create such decision making that as humans we’re not going to procreate, which really we haven’t seen in history before.
Tom Elliott:
So it doesn’t mean, I mean, if you’re a 23-year-old greenie, would you not bother going to university, not bother buying a house as well as not bothering to have children because you think that the world is going to end in 10 years?
Clare Rowe:
Well, I think that’s a very, very good question. And certainly some of these young people of that way persuaded aren’t doing much with their lives, to be honest. I mean, a lot of them, I see, are dedicating their time to be full-time activists. But when we’re even looking at school-aged kids, kids in high school, I do think that there are traits there of mental health problems because they’re not motivated to do much because they have been convinced that they won’t have a life when they’re older. And so they become not just anxious. I mean, it’s not really necessarily just climate anxiety as we term it now.
It’s really kind of into a helplessness and a depression, which is terribly sad because I think throughout human history, people have had children during wars and depressions and pandemics and periods of enormous uncertainty. I don’t think parenthood has ever depended on certainty about the future. So in many ways, having children is in itself an act of hope. And I’m very, very concerned that young people have become so fearful of the future that they begin to lose that hope altogether. And I just don’t think that there’s enough emphasis on the human resilience and problem solving and adaptability to give them that hope.
Tom Elliott:
Yeah. See, I find it extraordinary because I regard myself as an optimistic person. I’ve seen in my lifetime people’s lives are immeasurably better than what they were say 40 years ago. Technology has made our lives richer. We have access to all sorts of things that simply wasn’t possible back in the day. And I feel like saying to some of these young kids, “Look, you need to realise what it was like back in my day.” Which no one ever wants to hear someone saying that. And then for my parents and grandparents, what it was like back in their day.
I remember my late grandfather on my father’s side telling me the first time he lived in a house with electric lights as a little boy and he ran around the house switching them on because he just couldn’t believe that all you had to do was turn a switch and light would come on. And that’s within my adult life that he told me that. You know what I mean? So human progress has been extraordinary over the past 120 odd years. The first heavier than air flight was 1903. 66 years later we put two men on the moon. People should look at that and I would’ve thought be encouraged or excited about new technology.
Clare Rowe:
Oh, absolutely. I mean, that’s incredible to think that we’ve achieved that in a couple of generations. And people ask me all the time when I talk about this and the research I’ve done in this through the IPA, aren’t young people’s fears justified? Are they just being realistic? And I think it’s entirely reasonable to care about environmental issues. The question is whether we are helping young people understand those issues in a very balanced way.
I mean, children and adolescents are still developing their cognitive skills. They really don’t have the ability to judge risk and probability and uncertainty and the things that they are bombarded with usually I think through school. And if we spend years emphasising the threat without equally emphasising, like you said, human adaptability, the advancements of technology, innovation, we are creating a generation that feels very burdened by problems, but powerless to solve them.
Tom Elliott:
Yeah. Is it possible that today’s 22-year old who feels like that we’ll get to 32 and realise, well, actually the world hasn’t ended? Like the bloke down in front of the town hall saying the end is nigh, ringing a bell has been proven wrong yet again, and they’ll sort of become a bit more hopeful about future possibilities?
Clare Rowe:
Oh, look, I sincerely hope so. I sincerely hope so. But if we’re looking at this particular research and this problem about of course starting families, I don’t want people to wake up at 35 plus and think, oh goodness, the world didn’t end and I’d quite like a family now because of course that’s a very human biological urge to want to do that. And the fact that this issue and this fear of uncertainty has kind of taken over if you like, that biological drive is concerning in itself.
So yep, we can still go get careers and other things into our kind of 40s, but we can’t necessarily go back and wind the clock back, certainly for females and have children. So the fact that young women are saying they don’t want to have children through their 20s is upsetting and just a marked change from previous generations. Never before have we seen that. So yeah, I hope they do. I hope they wake up in their 30s or earlier preferably and realise that the world’s a great place and it’s going to be okay.
Tom Elliott:
I agree. Thank you so much for your time. Clare Rowe there, child and adolescent psychologist and research fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs.
This transcript of Clare Rowe speaking on Mornings with Tom Elliott 3AW Melbourne from 23 June 2026 has been edited for clarity.
