The Kind Of Family That Will Get Us Through All This

I talk to Lisa SIbbett of the Auntie Bulletin about climate change, childless cat ladies, and putting food on your children

Hello friends.

Community, friendships, and mutual aid have been on everyone’s lips, seemingly, since the election. I’ve been listening and learning from so many amazing writers like

Sarah Thankam Mathews

,

Courtney Martin

,

Garrett Bucks

,

Anne Helen Petersen

, and

Katherine Goldstein

; we touched on this theme in my podcast conversation with

Katharine Wilkinson

a little while ago, too.

Building community IRL is difficult when people are even more stressed out than normal and, as always, feeling pressed for time. I’m constantly checking in with myself about the time and energy I’m allocating to family, friends, my broader community, and of course myself.

But I have to say that I’ve been enjoying the community I’ve found here, on Substack, as I’ve started to spend more time here. And one of those people is

Lisa Sibbett

, who writes the

The Auntie Bulletin

, which is about:

“Supporting people to build kinship ties – ties that are intergenerational and purposely interrupting the structures that wall us off from each other. That includes the nuclear family, but also class barriers and language barriers and ethnicity barriers. It’s really about building community with all of our neighbors, not just the neighbors that look like us and seem like us.”

It also has lots of awesome tips for anyone with kids in their life, like on how to befriend a kid.

On Befriending Kids

Lisa and I have such mutual admiration, in fact, that we decided to team up:

For a limited time, if you upgrade to a paid subscription, you will also get a paid year-long subscription to Lisa’s newsletter—a 2-for-1 deal!—and vice versa.

Lisa Sibbett

And here’s more from our recent conversation:

AK: How do you describe The Auntie Bulletin to people who don't know about it?

…Kids are very easy to love. It’s a way into conversations about our responsibility to people who aren't within our immediate circle, family or community. If we have a responsibility to other people's children, then maybe we also have a responsibility to other people's parents and other people's neighbors and other people's extended communities.

I want to ask, what are our responsibilities to other people's people?

AK: I love that, and I think it's a very solid position to be in, where it doesn't have to be a partisan project to be political, though there's something very, very political in a deep way within it.

LS: This is a message that I want people to hear – readers of the Auntie Bulletin, readers of the Golden Hour – focusing on kids may be an opportunity to establish shared terrain – which can be harder to do if you start the conversation from race, or from climate justice, or from other lenses that are instantly politicized.

AK: I have been trying to talk about the polycrisis from the perspective of people wanting to be happy. It gets so big and so overwhelming that we're all shut down. There's denial, there’s paralysis. But when you flip it and ask, “How can I be more happy?” – well, one way you can be more happy is to be in touch with reality and be in touch with your feelings. Then it becomes a totally different project.

LS: I really appreciate your point that we’re really thinking about the same work, just on different scales. It makes me think of adrienne maree brown’s metaphor of fractals in activism and movement work. There are repeating patterns at the microscopic level and at the macroscopic level, but they’re the same patterns. If you can get the micro level of your immediate neighbors and get those relations right, and then just replicate that on a global scale, then we're good.

AK: I had a chance to interview [youth climate activist] Xiye Bastida when she was like 17. Her father's Otomi Toltec, Mexican Indigenous, and she said he always tells her, “How can you save the world if you can't clean up your room?” She said, we make altars and we make seasonal offerings, and in our symbolic way, we're trying to heal the earth with our offerings and with the way we lay out the altar.

I think about it all the time, because in the Jewish tradition, the home is the woman's spiritual domain, traditionally. The table is the altar, and the ceremony that you're in charge of is that table, which includes the people you gather together.

LS: I love that, and it’s making me think about something I heard on the All My Relations podcast. It's hosted by two awesome Indigenous women, Adrienne Keene and Matika Wilbur, who are both probably in their 30s. There was an episode about food sovereignty where Matika Wilbur was talking about going home after a year or more on the road doing a photography book (Project 562: Changing the Way We See Native America), and finally being able to eat her Native foods. An elder told her something like, “your work is to set the table for people, so the question is, who are you feeding?”

I think the question, “Who are you feeding?” is so material for Aunties and anyone who chooses to care for people outside their own household. Because we are regularly, literally preparing snacks and meals for people, but in a way that disrupts the ruts our society has gotten into in terms of who provides care.

AK: Oh, my gosh, I love that! It reminds me of how, for several years, we had a little summer group of families that would get some beach houses together and the kids would roam around. It was this totally idyllic scenario. You remember that line from George W. Bush, “we know it’s hard to put food on your family”? We’d joke, who’s putting food on the children? Whichever children, whichever house, throw some food on them!

That week or two of the summer was the time when we were living out our fantasy. It’s so hard to do in the city, and so hard to do with people's jobs – but that's the dream. That's what people want.

LS: Oh my god, totally! It's so healing to even be in that space for a short period of time. It makes my heart sing to imagine getting to live like that all the time. Which I do, to a certain extent.

AK: I'd love to hear more about your co-housing setup.

LS: Oh sure, so we have three households in two houses next door to each other. My partner and I live next door to one of my good friends from growing up and his partner and their kids, and then they have a basement apartment where another household is located, which is also in our community. It’s a delight. We have a shared backyard. We have meals together four nights a week. Kids are in and out of my house often.

The one thing that feels like it’s missing to me is actually more families, more kids. We only have two kids in the community, but I think what ends up being best for parents with young kids and for the kids themselves is having multiple families, like you were describing on your vacations, where the kids can just swirl around in a pack together, and whoever runs into them when they're hungry, we'll put some food on them!

AK: That's the situation I'm always seeking out.

LS: Yeah, I'm not surprised to hear that. The structures of our society are antithetical to building communities. You have to really work against the way that the infrastructure and policies are set up. Just at the level of housing policy and housing affordability – those are huge barriers.

AK: So let’s jump to the connections between a child-centric worldview and the climate.

LS: Let’s do! Can you kick us off and tell us how you came to the work you’re doing now?

AK: I started as an education reporter with a youth justice focus. Climate disaster was something that I experienced as a person growing up in the Gulf South, in Cancer Alley, in the path of hurricanes. When Katrina happened, I was there two weeks later with my family. I reported on the aftermath. I got married there the next year, and my bridal party gutted a house as part of our bridal week.

LS: That is amazing.

AK: But I still felt like, “I don't have a place in this movement,” because I built a career doing totally different things. It was just in the last couple of years, through the pandemic, that my climate justice work started to come into focus. There was this 2021 Lancet study by Eric Lewandowski, who did a massive survey of 10,000 young people, and 75% of them said, “the future is frightening because of climate change.” That was the study that got me to say, “I care about youth well-being, and youth well-being is a climate issue and climate change is a youth well-being issue. Therefore, here's my place.”

It also came from my own parenting experiences, having kids who were becoming aware of what's happening – my 3 year old saying, “why was there no snow this year?”

LS: And then I’d love to hear you talk about why adults who care about kids need to take climate disaster seriously.

AK: Actually, we know that they already do. Parents care more about climate change than non-parents. Mothers care more about climate change. A recent Stanford survey of families showed that 61% of parents with kids under 6 have been through an extreme weather event in the last two years. So it’s not just in kids’ lifetimes in the future, it’s right now. And it's not just our kids, it's all the world's kids.

Children, i.e., the adults of the future, are disproportionately distributed in the global South, and they are disproportionately facing catastrophic climate risk.

So it’s enlightened self-interest, but also part of being a good parent today, part of being a person who cares about children, is being conscious of climate. Lise Van Susteren, who's an important figure in the climate psychology world, draws an analogy to mandatory reporter status. She says, if you're a therapist or someone who works with children and there's a clear and present threat, you have to violate confidentiality and you have to report it to the authorities. Well, this is a clear and present threat to every child, so if you see it, you have to raise the alarm.

LS: Wow. That is such a good argument. That is so compelling.

AK: I mean, we do need to preserve our peace. One of the great joys of spending time with children is you must be in the moment. You must have joy. You must be present with things as they're happening. I find time with children to be a huge refuge. But at the same time, we have to be mindful of what's happening in the world. We have to be a sort of semi-permeable membrane so that they get enough to know what's happening, but without it being so distressing.

When I work with parents, with caregivers, with educators, it’s clear we need to do our work on our feelings and our knowledge of the world, so then we can present to kids the right amount and perspective. We have to not be totally sealed off. Even babies get your stress. They get your anxiety. So you have to be able to discuss it, whatever it is. That's part of parenting through all of this. But so is being the safe landing place and maintaining the routines and all the things that we do with kids.

LS: That's such a good segue to the next thing we planned to talk about. What do you advise adults to say to kids about climate catastrophe and the polycrisis? No biggie.

AK: Yeah, I mean, it sounds insane when you put it that way. I often quote Megan Bang, who is an educator of educators and of Ojibwe descent. She told me in an interview that kindergartners are coming to school with the perspective that humans ruined the earth and the earth is dying. So kindergartners and younger children need to experience the opposite, which is that humans are part of the earth, and humans take care of the earth.

That's not only talking; that's like, what do we do? How do we experience taking care of the earth? Well, we experience taking care of the signs of nature around us. You can be in a city, you can be in a rural area, but there's something alive around you that you could be a part of helping, whether that's like “we don't break branches off the tree,” or we can feed the birds at the park. It’s about being alive and awake and aware to the signs of nature.

Children have so much innate biophilia. So that's one thing – providing kids with the connection and experience of themselves as caregivers.

And then the basic message is always kind of the same routine.

“Something is happening, and we have a plan. The threat is this, we’re doing this. I’m going to do everything I can to keep you safe.

We can do things to calm our bodies. We can do things to forget about what's happening for a little while. We can also learn more together if you have questions. We're going to look for the helpers. We're going to be a helper.”

LS: I love your suggestion to position kids as people who are stewards of the environment and who are actively intervening to care for our environment and our communities. Where I live in the Pacific Northwest region of the U.S., we haven't yet had fires burning directly in urban communities, but we are very impacted by smoke in the summer, and by air quality issues. It’s become a huge issue for the whole American West Coast and Mountain West, so kids are super aware of it. They can’t not be.

So what are the practicalities that we can be messaging to kids about? Maybe it’s thinking about how we use water. Or, are we going to take the bus or are we going to drive a car? And why did I buy an electric car? And also having them participate in making decisions, like

“What do you think? Should we buy the compostable plates or should we buy the plastic plates for our party? Here we are at the store. What do you think we should do?” Just involving them in those decisions. Maybe even thinking about, “Well, the compostable plates cost more money. Do you think we should still get them?” So it’s about helping them to start embodying that logic of somebody who is participating as a steward in their communities.

AK: Although there's always a tension, between empowering kids with agency and looking to them as saviors or lifting them up as the hope.

LS: Oh interesting, I hadn’t thought about that.

AK: I do a lot of work in conversation with mothers’ movements, parents’ movements, where we say, “We want to share that burden and share that responsibility.” That's the spirit of care.

There was actually a paper in Nature magazine recently that looked at the parents’ climate movement and talked about substituting climate justice for a care ethic. The climate justice perspective is really about pushing against the powers that be for recognition. But the care ethic is about calling everyone in and saying, “This is our future, and everybody has a stake in that future.” Which I love.

This is often framed as a dilemma about, “Should I have kids? Should I not have kids because of the climate crisis?” I’m like, you can skip having kids; if that's the right answer for you, totally do it. But it doesn't get you off the hook for being engaged in the future. If you thought that not having kids would exempt you from worrying about climate change, it won't do that.

LS: I'm so glad you brought up this topic, because I’ve been wanting to figure out how to write about this ever since JD Vance said that childless cat ladies have no stake in the future. That was such a moment for childless women in the United States – and around the world – to both claim our identity and push back against the dominant narrative about us, right? The argument that people without children have no stake in the future to me was just so absurd. It felt so ridiculous.

There certainly are a lot of people who have chosen not to have children for climate reasons. And I think a lot of those people are doing it because they have a stake in the future. Maybe they want to focus their energies on advocacy and organizing and movement building around climate justice. Maybe they want to not contribute more carbon emissions, because having a kid is the biggest carbon impact that you can have.

Which is not a judgment on parents at all. I think this sometimes gets set up as a rivalry or face-off – like, you're a bad person for climate reasons if you have kids, or you're a bad person if you don't have kids because you don’t have a stake in the future. It can get set up as an antagonism, which I think is really, really wrong.

I just think for myself as an Auntie, and for a lot of other people who have embraced or want to embrace a life and practice of care, this choice is absolutely about the future. It’s about making a future that doesn't suck, and having as much capacity as possible to work toward that.

AK: And it's part of our evolutionary superpowers, this concept of allomothering. We became who we are because of grandmothers and other folks who are willing to pour themselves into the work of care.

LS: I think people who buy into a really individualist model of family, they can maybe care about the needs of their own children and grandchildren, but their great grandchildren start to get abstract – not to mention their great great grandchildren, and their great great great grandchildren. It’s hard to be a good ancestor to seven generations down the line, or twenty generations, or fifty, because the farther out we get, the more those start to feel like other people’s children, and therefore not my problem.

But when you cultivate a daily practice of caring for other people's children, I think that actually makes it easier for you to give a sh** about the children who will be alive in 200 years or 1000 years.

AK: I'd love to hear your thoughts about community resilience-building through kinship and other forms of collectivism. How have you seen that play out? How do you think it might work?

LS: I’ve become a real criticizer of the nuclear family model that we've all had imposed on us over the last few generations. I’ve written that if humans have been around for 300,000 years, that's like 2000 generations, and for only 2 or 3 generations in human history have we been doing this nuclear family thing. We are not wired for it, and it’s not good for us.

I think that that's what we need to be building – massive forests of humans who recognize how truly interdependent we are, and actively work to interlock with one another – and not just with our little groups that seem to be like us.

Where I live in Seattle, speaking of climate disaster, we are due for this huge Cascadia earthquake that’s forecast to potentially do massive damage and have massive casualties. When that time comes, we're going to need to be able to come together with all of our neighbors, not just the ones who look like us and are in our same social class.

I think that building a whole forest-worth of kinship starts with learning how to build just one kinship relationship with somebody who is not actually in your family. It’s hard, scary, and vulnerable to be like, “Will you be in my family? Can I be in your family?” “Will you really let me pick your kids up from school one day a week and take care of them? I really do want to do that.” Or, “Can I really ask you to go grocery shopping for me? Is that a thing we can ask of each other?”

We need to cultivate the courage to do that, and the stamina, and get to feel in our bodies the actual joy and liberation of it, because it feels so much better than the way that we normally live. And as we practice this with our loved ones, maybe it gets easier to be like, okay, actually, I can have that same kind of conversation with my older Vietnamese neighbors across the street. I've heard this disposition described as “civic courage.”

AK: It does take courage, because you're violating social norms.

LS: Right? And you’re being really vulnerable.

AK: And it happens in the doing. I'm from New Orleans, and New Orleans builds this muscle through celebration.

LS: I think we both responded to Ryan Rose Weaver’s recent post on Substack about this exact thing. Movement building needs to be joyful and actually attractive.

We're living through such a dark and scary and infuriating time. And yet I find myself feeling hopeful at the amount of energy and momentum I'm experiencing in my communities. People are incredibly fired up to organize, to build a strong, strong movement and be serious about it this time. It’s a weird emotional roller coaster: things are so messed up, and feeling those feelings, but then also feeling this real excitement and optimism and hope about the things that are happening.

AK: I'm with you. I think it's an incredible wisdom that we're tapping into collectively, which is the need to really make our efforts sustainable for the long haul. And joyful. It's sinking in for me that this is probably going to be the next 4, 5, 6 years of my life, if not more, trying to get America away from authoritarianism. It's very important, and we’re dealing with climate collapse at the same time. While throwing a party may seem like an illogical response, it’s actually, I think, kind of spot on.

LS: Absolutely. In fact, I think it might be the only thing that's going to work. This is making me think about Erica Chenoweth’s research showing that nonviolent revolutions, empirically, are far more successful than violent revolutions. They’ve argued that nonviolent resistance works because it’s a lot easier and safer to join than a violent resistance – and even, potentially, fun. They talk about when all your neighbors are marching past your window banging on pots and pans and making a joyful noise to overthrow the dictator, you want to grab your own pots and pans and get out there and join them.