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“My 12-year-old daughter worries a lot about climate change, AI, the future, and so do I. I don’t want to tell her everything is fine. I also don’t want to follow her into the dark. What should I do?”
– Seattle-area parent
A few years ago, a mother in a similar situation sat in my office and described a heart-rending talk with her 12-year-old son. He had come home from school shaken by a lesson on ocean warming. They talked for an hour, looked things up together. They got sad together. The mother told me it was one of the best conversations they’d ever had.
She also told me it was the beginning of the worst three months they’d ever had.
Her son had always been prone to anxiety, as was she, and the doomsday talks took on a life of their own until they became what she called a “bad habit” of obsessing about the future.
Neither of them could see that the problem wasn’t the subject of the conversation. It was the shape of it.
Why does talking about her fears seem to make them worse?
Psychologists call it “co-rumination”: two people turning a problem over and over, dwelling on the details, marinating in the feelings and generating more repetitive worrying. This can feel like closeness because it is closeness. That’s the trap.
Research on mothers and adolescents finds co-rumination linked to more anxiety and depression in kids and to closer relationships, both at once. Those two things ride in on the same horse, which is exactly why it is hard to flag. When does a parent walk away from a tender hour with their kid thinking, well, that was clinically inadvisable?
Your instinct that you shouldn’t dismiss your daughter’s fears is correct. Your instinct that you shouldn’t follow her into the dark is also correct. There’s a third possibility: talking about scary things in a way that ends somewhere. Think of it as navigating a narrow road. Dismissal is one ditch. Joining her in the gloom is the other. Our job is to stay on the road between them.
Is it typical for a 12-year-old to worry this much?
Let me lower the temperature on one thing: Kids have always done this.
When I was starting out, the existential worry of the day was nuclear war. Between 1975 and 1984, national surveys of American high school seniors found that somewhere between a fifth and a third expected their lives to be cut short by nuclear or biological destruction. Teenagers wrote about it in journals. Academic journals published anguished papers about the psychological damage of growing up under the bomb.
I don’t say this to wave off your daughter’s fear, which is about real things. I say it because it reveals something useful about the machinery.
Around age 12, kids develop a new capacity for abstract and hypothetical thinking. Little kids worry too, but now they can contemplate various outcomes from specific actions, the fate of the planet and a future that hasn’t happened yet, and keep following the “what ifs” wherever they lead.
Certain kids — often the bright, sensitive ones who lie awake asking about what happens when you die — have minds that reach for the biggest unknowns and grip them. Climate change and AI give kids some particularly potent things to grab on to. That’s why psychologists often call this state “sticky brain.”
Are the facts and forecasts about AI and climate change scary? Yes. There is enough evidence on both topics to validate those fears. Now let’s address the parent-child dance around talking about it.
What can I say when my child brings up topics that scare them?
The conversation you are having with your daughter is one we are all having. Is climate change really that bad? Will AI take all our jobs? And once futuristic fears start festering, they can spiral. When you finally calm your panic over rising sea levels, you start obsessing over mortality. Conquer the fear of death, and you move on to AI. Solve that, and it’s global politics. You are playing whack-a-mole with a mole that is not the whole problem. Here are some ways to address these very real fears, without continuing the cycle:
Say both halves
Instead of “That’s not going to happen” (dismissal) or “I know, it’s terrifying” (joining her in the dark), try: “That’s a scary thing to think about, and I know you can handle hard thoughts. Sitting with uncertainty is really hard, and I have faith that you can do it.”
That combination of acceptance plus confidence is central to a parent-based treatment for childhood anxiety called SPACE, which stands for Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions. In a rigorous clinical trial SPACE was seen to be as effective as individual cognitive behavioral therapy. The message is both/and: Yes, this is really hard, and I think you can handle it. I have said versions of this so many times that my children can do an impression of me saying it.
Give the conversation a floor
It’s not a limit on caring, but rather a landing place for the conversation. Twenty minutes of real talk, then something that moves the body or hands: take a walk, deal with the compost or write a letter to a member of Congress. Research with adolescents finds that concern and hope can motivate engagement, while despair breeds helplessness — a close cousin to depression. Taking action helps, and it doesn’t have to be proportionate to the problem. A 12-year-old cannot fix the ocean. She can do a volunteer park cleanup with you on Saturday.
Mind your own volume
You told me you worry too. Kids may inherit some vulnerability to anxiety, but they also learn how to react by watching us. They learn from what we model, how we narrate danger and what we do when we’re scared. Managing anxiety is a skill. It’s built on habits, and habits can be reshaped with a little daily practice.
Dr. Laura’s bottom line about addressing your child’s fears
You’re doing the loving thing when you help your child find a middle path between the ditches. Try stopping the conversation before you join them in the gloom, with a sentence that says “I’ve got you” rather than “you’re right to be afraid,” and then go do something small and meaningful together.
Or something silly. It is very hard to catastrophize while losing at Bananagrams (No data to support this one; just decades of working with families and a strong hunch.)
Acceptance, confidence and action.
That’s not denial. That’s how people have always survived the future.
