Why Miley Cyrus Doesn't Want Kids
Jade Sasser's new book Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question: Deciding Whether to Have Children in an Uncertain Future
Hello friends.
First I just want to mention, because it’s really present for me right now, that I’m feeling a lot of grief over the current global marine heat wave. Ocean creatures are suffocating. The Daily had a really troubling episode about it this week (as a side note, I don’t love that they are still running greenwashing ads from oil companies), and
writes about the dire consequences for people, including my family in New York City and my family on the Gulf Coast. I already have some dread building about this year’s hurricane season. Climate scientists told the Guardian they are feeling “hopeless and broken” right now.I don’t have any easy bromide, or place to put that, but I want you to know that if it’s on your mind, you’re not alone.
This week, I have a pair of author posts in honor of Mother’s Day. I’m interviewing Jade Sasser today, and Elissa Strauss on Sunday.
Miley Cyrus’s breakup anthem “Flowers” is a banger. I’ve bopped along with my kids many times to the line “Built a home and watched it burn.”
What didn’t click, until I read Jade Sasser’s new book, is that this was not a metaphor. Cyrus and Liam Hemsworth lost a multimillion dollar home in Malibu, California, to the Woolsey Fire in 2018. Hemworth filed for divorce the following year.
As Sasser points out, Cyrus, like many women her age, has vowed not to have children because of climate change. I can only imagine that living through that kind of direct loss shaped her viewpoint on this. In July 2019, she told Elle magazine:
“We’re getting handed a piece-of-shit planet, and I refuse to hand that down to my child…Until I feel like my kid would live on an Earth with fish in the water, I’m not bringing in another person to deal with that.”
Speaking for her generation, she added,
“We don’t want to reproduce because we know that the Earth can’t handle it.”
Sasser is Associate Professor at the University of California, Riverside, and her new book, Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question, features a range of interviews and other research that sheds light on the of people, especially women, grappling with the same feelings as Miley. She also has a podcast of the same name that’s well worth listening to.
One of her main goals with the book and the podcast was to diversify the exploration of climate emotions. I agree that’s been a blind spot, including at times for me in this newsletter.
“Writing on climate emotions—a lot of it focused on eco-anxiety—focuses on the experiences of young, white, middle-class people… These descriptions frame climate change as the greatest existential threat of our time, a perspective that ignores thelong-standing existential threats that have faced communities of color,” she writes.
That’s exactly where I started our conversation.
What do we have to gain by bringing in a more inclusive, diverse, encompassing vision of this intersection between women or parenting and climate change?
I think we have to gain a fuller, deeper, richer understanding of the dimensions of climate emotions and of their reproductive impact.I think the mainstream story that we have been getting has been narrow and not fully accurate.
When one group of people have their stories sort of centered and lifted up, it suggests that that is a universal experience, A, or that B, that other groups don't actually experience, or have any response or reaction to the challenges that are being discussed, and neither of those is true. There is no universal experience of climate anxiety and related reproductive questions and it is certainly not the case that people of color don't care. So I just wanted to lift that up.
Black and Latinx people have been shown in surveys to care more, to be more concerned, to be more worried. What I found in my survey was that people of color were most likely to express feeling traumatized about climate change and climate crisis, and that across the board the most distressing emotions were most commonly reported by people of color.
I think it's important to understand that a people of color generally are left out of the discussion when it comes to articles and interviews, but also for a lot of people of color. You can't really separate climate change from other big, you know, threatening distressing things that are happening. And so for some people, if you say, what are your emotions about climate change, or how do you feel about climate change? They might say, Well, I mean I don't have any, at least not any unique ones, because climate change, in addition to everything else is so distressing.
I started to use the term polycrisis, because I find it's helpful. I'm talking about things that are happening in the world, that are intersecting, that are threat multipliers that impact on your your ability to live your life, right?
Yes.
I'm struggling how exactly to phrase this, but there's something that bugs me about the discourse about affluent white women refusing to have children because of the climate crisis. It bugs me that we're gonna place a woman's decision to have children as the most important thing they could or could not do, to express their feelings or their their views. And it also bugs me that there would be a public opinion about someone's personal choice.
I don't think that reproduction is individual or personal. We make those decisions in a broader social context. And so in the book, I profile three activist campaigns, or public-facing movements. One is a pledge that an 18 year old climate activist launched in Canada. They wanted to start a conversation. They wanted to get people talking, and A, recognizing that climate anxiety is real, B, that it is having a very significant impact on young people's lives, and C, it might really actually change the shape and structure of families in the future, and they wanted older people to to get it.
They created this pledge and launched it right before an election. They wanted older people to understand that they may not have the grandkids that they wanted. And they wanted those older people to vote accordingly, choose leaders who were climate-progressive.
And the other 2 that I talk about in the book, they were created from an awareness that people make reproductive decisions based on the conditions that they're living in. And a question of— is this a set of circumstances in which I feel good about my ability to raise a child, protect them from harm, keep them safe, and give them a good life and a good future?
And those questions right now are very heavily shaped by the climate crisis. So yes, of course, whether a person will have a child, adopt a child, raise the child, parent a child. Yes, it's personal, but it's shaped by these larger social conditions. And for me, that's a really important point to note.
When people struggle in silence over their reproductive decisions, that leads to a lot more stigma and distress.
People who recognize that that they're not the only ones who are grappling with this issue, especially in the climate crisis, feel a sense of reassurance that came up over and over in interviews.
But also I think it's important for people to understand climate emotions are a collective experience created by climate change. And those institutional actors that are driving the climate crisis, making it worse, they are who we should be, sort of responding to with our climate emotions, and climate reproductive concerns, rather than internalizing, and saying, this is only something that I'm experiencing.
Sure. So, understanding that there are culprits here. This is happening for a reason, because of decisions made by people in power.
Yeah. But what I'm also saying is that when people feel that these kinds of reflections, or grapplings or struggles are solely personal and private, it makes it harder to understand that this is a broader social phenomenon happening to a lot of people and my goals is, I want people to start having these conversations. Not because anyone should tell anyone else what to do with their bodies, but for people to understand they are not alone.
I think in doing that and gaining support, people can maybe alleviate some of the pressure and some of the guilt that they are experiencing
What is the guilt?
Well, a lot of people facing this question feel extremely guilty about wanting to fulfill their personal emotional desires to have a family and raise children, knowing that climate crisis is here, and it will continue to get worse, at least for some period of time. So, knowing how unstable the climate is knowing what kinds of ecological impacts we're having now, and very likely will have in the future, bringing a new life into that, knowing how bad it is, and will continue to be. A lot of people are grappling with that. That's a moral and ethical dilemma for a lot of people, and for a lot of women in particular, the grappling is expressed through the language of guilt.
I very much understand that. That is the guilt of women who want children, right?
I mean, most people in the book are not 100% certain that they will never have children. Most people were ambivalent.
For those who were clear that they don't want children, will not have children, are actively, you know, planning to never have children, they were fewer in number and for them, no, guilt was not a feeling that came up at all. It was more so a feeling of Why would I do that to someone?
How about the women who did have children?
They had children and dealt with climate anxiety as parents. Going ahead and having a child does not cure you of or alleviate the anxiety in any way. It just sort of puts you into a new dimension of how you're going to manage and navigate those feelings.
And what I found is that for those who are really struggling with climate anxiety as parents, they have to be what I refer to as reproductively resilient. And there's a particular kind of resilience that parents will have to have both in terms of managing their own emotions and mental health response, but also in terms of educating their children in age, appropriate ways about climate change, finding tools and resources to support their children as their children express their own climate, emotions, and climate anxieties.
A woman who I interviewed for my podcast —-I also interviewed her child. The child was 9, and the mother talked about witnessing in real time how her child has developed climate anxiety, and how that anxiety is worsening in a short period of time.
I think the good thing though, of course, is, there are more and more organizations that have resources to support parents and educators. People who work with children, teenagers, and young people. I know that you are also involved with the Climate Mental Health Network. And so their tools and resources are really important. There are other organizations developing those tools and resources.
If anything getting this conversation out in the broader public means that there will be more resources developed to support would-be parents, existing parents, educators, people who are struggling with this question, people who need mental health support, etc. I think that's another reason why this public discussion needs to be had.
With people from different backgrounds— did they experience different versions of cultural pressure to have children? And how did they respond to those?
I would say my interviewees, who were Latinx and from immigrant families, they were experiencing significant family pressure to have children from a very young age. I talked to people who were 21,22, 23, and whose parents and families really wanted them to have babies. And of course it makes sense from a a cultural perspective. However, these were young people who were navigating really different cultural norms in the United States, all of them being the first in their families to go to college, and being the first in their families to really be science literate, climate literate, and to have developed a different priority system and different values. So they were managing and navigating cultural differences with their own families and generational differences, too. And those cultural values definitely played a role for them.
One of my interviewees, her family was from Ghana, and she also grew up with a large family, and has a family that expects her to have a lot of children at a young age, and she very much wants a lot of children. But again is in this dilemma, feeling like morally and ethically, she can't have them. And so for her adoption is really the way that she's thinking of having a family, and that was more common among people who were from larger families and whose cultural backgrounds really favor having kids, lots of kids.
When I think about the the disproportionate impact of climate change, or climate justice, one point that stands out—it's my understanding, and please correct me, that sociologically, when people are truly in a marginal and a disruptive situation, that they will have more children sometimes. Like that can be a response under war.
I think it really is situation and context specific. And you know, children become a really important way of transmitting cultural values, leaving a legacy, a way of saying, We , our people, whoever that people is, we will survive and thrive in the future.
And children also represent hope for the future, too. So I definitely know that throughout the history of civil rights and racial terror in the Us. African Americans, children have been an important sort of symbol of, things will be better in the future. I may not live to see things be better, but my children will. But also keep in mind that during the period of enslavement, enslaved women were doing everything they could to not have children. And in some cases were committing infanticide, because, they said, I will not let my children live in this horrible circumstance. So context, specific, historically specific, it it just really really varies.
We see that birth rates are going down all over the world. How does that intersect with what people actually think is going to happen in the future versus what they want for themselves in their own lifetimes?
They're all very complicated questions. And then, of course, you also have the question of, you know, people who come from backgrounds or communities that have never experienced existential threat, have always felt safe and protected, especially protected by their governments, have a very, very different response to this question versus communities that have always been under threat, that have always experienced violence, trauma and harm. In those cases having children is very important. That doesn't mean, though, that members of those communities aren't struggling to right now. And that, for me, was the part of the story that I didn't see being written anywhere in anything that I had read, and that was the reason why I wanted to do this research of my own.
So you have in some ways like a naive population to existential threat. It's like their historical memory doesn't include having a genocidal government that wants to get rid of them or enslave them. And then this thing is happening. It's like, Oh, my God, civilization might come to an end. I mean, I think that's probably something I first grasped from Mary Annaïse Heglar’s writing. There's lots of peoples that have been through existential threats before this generation.
But what you're saying is that the struggle continues, that actually women from all different backgrounds are also feeling this. And it is experienced and expressed differently. And we need to understand those differences in order to have a fuller picture of what's going on with a variety of groups.
And do you mind just kind of sketching what those differences are?
Well again, for those who are from groups or backgrounds where they've never experienced existential threat before, it comes as a shock. It comes as a Oh, my God! My government is actually taking actions that knowingly are harmful to me, and will be harmful to future generations. I don't think I can have kids under those circumstances, whereas for other groups, black and Indigenous groups in particular there has never been any expectation of government or state protection from harm. there has been a very clear awareness of governments creating harm and understanding that resilience and survival is something that has to be community led in in many instances, through a spirit of resistance or even defiance, and having kids falls into that right, a spirit of resistance and defiance, we will persist, and we will exist, no matter what
But what I am saying, though, is that even those who feel that feeling, persistence, and resistance no matter what, are still traumatized by climate change. And it makes it even harder to make that decision around having kids, not having kids, parenting kids, who might not be biologically related, etc.
Climate change is adding another dimension of of real trauma.
What are your thoughts about the gendered nature of this conversation?
It's bothersome to me, and I didn't want to write a book that was entirely about women, but I couldn't get men to participate in interviews, and when I spoke to women about it, and particularly around the question of how their partners felt about this question, whether they were discussing these issues with partners.
The majority of their partners still wanted to have kids and and really weren't factoring climate change into their decision-making. With the exception of one friend, she and her partner came from a country that was a war zone, and they experienced war as children. She is now trying to become pregnant. Her partner very much does not want to have a child
Many of his reasons are climate related, but also kind of more broadly, the world is a terrible place. Why would you bring a kid into it?
But he was the only male partner, who I heard about throughout the process, who was very adamantly opposed to having children for these reasons, and I don't think it can be delinked from the fact that he experienced war as a child.
Well, so you're saying that the women are going through all of this and the men are like, it's gonna be fine.
For the most part, but I did have 2 interviews with men. One was in Chapter 4, and he was very, very clear, he will be a parent, but he will be a parent of a foster child or an adopted child, not a biological one and the other man that I interviewed he wasn't sure he was more so focused on. What is my contribution to the climate fight? And the kid question for him was something that he was sort of grappling with and ambivalent about, but he didn't have a firm, clear direction in in any way on that.
Yeah, it seems wildly uneven. We just define women so much more by this choice.
I think it's a because women can get pregnant and therefore have to, you know, sort of safeguard reproductive autonomy, and have to really think about it, and act on it, and and be vigilant about it through most of a lifetime, or all of the reproductive years. These, these just end up. Not being distant questions, they they become more sort of close up lived questions. And we can't discount ongoing societal pressure.
Young people in their reproductive years still face a tremendous amount of pressure to have children, especially from older people in their lives. .
What I find very interesting is that I have heard from Gen Z-ers in particular, who say that increasingly, they peer pressure each other to not have kids. In particular, in some friend groups expressing that you really want children is a very unpopular thing. Not just for environmental reasons. But I think it's becoming more and more common for young people to say, this is a terrible situation that we're in globally, societally. Why on earth would you have children? So the peer pressure? It's kind of moving in the opposite direction for some young people.
Yeah, that's really interesting. I mean, it really speaks to this feeling of guilt that you talked about right? That's gonna actually come from their peers to say, Oh, actually, I do want to do this.
Yes.
Although whether or not that's strong enough to counteract kind of the pro-natalism in the general society. I don't know.
Time will tell. Right? And it will kind of be hard to know what what role climate change alone plays in those trends. There are so many things that come together around that decision. But it's it's absolutely a growing factor in that decision process.
Thank you so much. Is there anything else that I didn't ask about that you wanted to mention?
I do close the book with a chapter that talks about feeling cautiously hopeful. And I do wanna say it's important to know that distress is not the only climate emotion that people experience. And multiple emotions can and do exist at the same time. And even when we are experiencing distress, climate, anxiety, all those challenging emotions, other emotions are available to us as well, and one way to access them is really being in good community with other people, and in particular, working together with other community members to support each other through this ongoing climate crisis.
Really enjoyed this interview and perspective!
🙏💜