Raising Children to Cope with Climate Change? MARGRIT EICHLER OISE/University of Toronto
INTRODUCTION On December 21, 2013, there was a severe ice storm in Toronto, which knocked out power in parts of the city for days. Most people had their power restored within five days. I was out of the country at the time, and when I returned I asked my friends whether they had experienced a power outage and if so, how they had coped with it. Here are the stories of two of my friends, both highly intelligent women in their 50s. One friend said: Oh, it wasn’t too bad – actually, we had a blast. I roasted a turkey on the BBQ, invited a whole lot of friends, and asked them to bring a duvet in which to wrap themselves. We sat around the fireplace, took pictures of how ridiculous we looked, ate, told stories and had a great time.
The second friend took a different perspective, stating: Well, it was difficult. Between me and my daughter, we had $40.- I tried to drive, but the lights were down and the traffic was wild, so I stayed home. The ATMs in my area were all out, so we lived on the $40.- for the 5 days we were without power. For Christmas, we shared a Subway sandwich. After three days in the cold, I realized that my judgement was no longer functioning properly. It took us a while to recover from the experience.
Both women have good jobs, and have good social networks. One behaved in a resilient fashion, the other did not.
Margrit Eichler, OISE/University of Toronto, 252 Bloor Street West, Toronto, ON M5S 1V6, Canada. E-mail: [email protected]
C 2015 Canadian Sociological Association/La Soci´ et´e canadienne de sociologie
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Resilience1 refers to the ability to become strong, healthy, or successful again after something bad happens,2 to be able to withstand or recover quickly from difficult conditions.3 This is the most important characteristic I believe our children and grandchildren will need during their lifetimes, as will their children, and grandchildren, and great grandchildren, etc., into the foreseeable future, due to climate change.
CLIMATE CHANGE By now, the scientific consensus is that climate change is inevitable, that it has already started, and that it will get very much worse in the future. How much worse, no one can tell, but at least four points can be stated with some certainty.4 First, there will be many more severe weather events: coastal flooding and inland flooding, ice storms, prolonged snow storms, mud slides, inundations, droughts, hurricanes, cyclones, heat waves, wildfires, and more. Second, natural catastrophes affect people in the region in which the catastrophes happen most, but they also have a cumulative effect on the entire country. In the wake of many catastrophes, the physical infrastructure (electricity, drinking water, streets, houses, etc.) is affected, but as incidences of natural disasters rise, so will be the social infrastructure. Third, with rapidly changing weather, food production will be affected—within Canada and the United States, but also internationally. For example, in 2012, 85 percent of Ontario’s apple crop was wiped out because of the weather (Irish 2013). Damaged crops will result in higher food prices and a corresponding increase in food insecurity for the poorer segments of society. A final point is that inequality in Canada has dramatically increased. Unless this trend gets reversed soon, more of the poor—especially Indigenous people, women, children, and people with disabilities—will simply die earlier. We have seen this effect when the Soviet Union dissolved. In the wake of the social turmoil this originated, life expectancy dropped dramatically. Between 1990 and 1994, life expectancy for Russian men declined from 63.8 to 57.7 years and for women from 74.4 to 71.2 years (Notzon et al. 1998). Internationally, North America will not be the region in the world that will suffer the most from climate change in the short run. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC 2014), Asia will be most affected, but looking at already visible effects, Africa and Latin America are next in line to suffer substantially. That means that 1.
As applied to people.
2.
Merriam-Webster definition.
3.
Oxford Dictionary.
4.
I am relying on the IPCC Report no. 5 (IPCC 2014) as the basis of my predictions.
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those countries that contributed least to our current situation in terms of greenhouse gas emissions are going to experience the brunt of the negative effects earlier and more savagely than those countries that contributed most. That mirrors the situation of the poor within our own country: having contributed least to the problem, they will suffer the consequences first and experience them more brutally than those of us who contribute to the problem more. Eventually, the consequences will reach all of us, but there will likely be a time delay. Many of the Third World countries have a high number of relatively young people, who are likely to procreate, as young people do. My assumption is that there will be many who will blame North America, and who will want to export some of the suffering they experience to us. This will mean increased international turmoil, suicide attacks, maybe mass attacks. Likely, the rich will want to stay in gated communities that will exacerbate class distinctions. Resource wars will be going on. All of this is going to affect the world economic system, which will eventually crash. We will be thrown back onto our own resources: human, social, ecological, and economic, while dealing with an increasingly hostile natural environment that will throw one curveball after the other at humanity. The turmoil in the natural weather will therefore be matched by turmoil in the social, economic, and political systems. In other words—our children and grandchildren can look forward to a future with much sociopolitical instability, much reduced resources to deal with much more serious problems than the ones with which my generation had to cope. Unless they are very rich, their collective as well as individual living standards will be drastically reduced compared to what we are enjoying now. In order to survive and maybe even flourish under such circumstances, they will require a great degree of resilience.
THE FAMILY OF THE FUTURE Let us speculate what the family of children born today might look like. Parents will be older. In 1974, just under 20 percent of all mothers were 30 years and older, in 2010, just over 50 percent were in that age category. The age of fathers has gone up as well. “In 1995, nearly 44% of fathers were in their thirties and 36% were in their forties. Some ten years later, the situation was reversed: 33% were aged 30 to 39 and 44% were in their forties. Additionally, the proportion of fathers in their fifties increased from 10% in 1995 to 15% in 2006” (Statistics Canada 2014b).5 Many of the children will likely have experienced the divorce of their parents, or were born to an unmarried woman. In 2011, the fertility rate in Canada was 1.61 (Statistics Canada 2014a). Although there will be
5.
These data are from 2006. Likely the age of fathers has continued to increase.
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extended family members for most, the numbers will be smaller than in times when the fertility rate was higher. Since the parents will be older, their parents will be older as well, meaning that grandparents will be alive for a shorter span of their grandchildren’s lives, therefore less practical help can be expected from the older generation to the younger generation and vice versa, as older parents cope with young children and their own aged parents. By the time children born today are 30, and probably before then, they will have to cope with at least some of the turmoil that I have briefly outlined above. For us at this point in time, it is just barely foreshadowed. In order to survive and even do well in the tumultuous and difficult times they will experience, these adults will have to have enormous resilience, the capacity to think and act independently while cooperating with others, inventiveness, good health and stamina, the ability to do more with less. They will need practical skills such as gardening, cooking, preserving, repairing, and maybe making garments, fixing things that are broken— skills that my parents learned from their own parents, but that few adults possess today to pass on to their children.
WHAT IS THE LIKELIHOOD OF THEIR RESILIENCE? Resilience is a multifaceted phenomenon. Here are some of the issues that seem most pertinent in this context. Health I will look at current patterns to extrapolate into the future. The most basic issue is health. If the health is compromised, everything else becomes more difficult. “At any given time, 14% of children aged 4 to 17 years (over 800 000 in Canada) experience clinically important mental disorders, but fewer than 25% of these children receive specialized treatment services” (Waddell et al. 2005). Between 1981 and 2007/2009, the health of Canadian children deteriorated markedly. According to Statistics Canada (2010), The results demonstrate a significant deterioration since 1981, regardless of sex or age. In particular, muscular strength and flexibility have decreased, and all measures of adiposity have increased. Children are taller, heavier, fatter and weaker than in 1981. Previous research predicts that a population decline in fitness, as observed here, may result in accelerated noncommunicable disease development, increased health care cost, and loss of future productivity.
To pick just one specific aspect in this overall picture, “The percentage classified as overweight or obese rose from 14% to 31% among boys, and
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from 14% to 25% among girls” (Statistics Canada 2010:7). The authors also note that fitness may have been overestimated due to the method chosen. CTV reported on March 27, 2014, that an American study found an increase of autism-related disorders from 1 in 150 in 2007 to 1 in 68 “now,” and that these numbers are comparable to Canadian numbers. Even though some of this increase may be due to more children being diagnosed as having this disorder, the numbers are very worrying. In terms of health, we are producing a significant number of children who are unlikely to be highly resilient. Unsupervised Outdoors Play and Activities Louv (2008) argues that children are suffering from “nature deficit disorder,” the “broken bond between our young and nature” (p. 3), which results in “diminished use of the senses, attention difficulties and higher rates of emotional and physical illnesses” (p. 36). Play outside is widely recognized as providing many benefits, including giving children a chance to burn off energy, calm them and recharge their energy levels, help them understand and interact with the natural world, provide them with opportunities for more social interaction with peers, help develop their powers of observation and their assessment of risk, offer opportunities for creativity and free play, and increase their physical health (Government of Alberta 2014). The healing properties of interacting with nature for adults have been explored in a number of contexts (Westlund 2014). So how much time are children spending outside, either playing or walking or in other forms of physical activity? The recommended time for Canadian children and youth for “moderate to vigorous physical activity” (MVPA) is 60 minutes per day. (Statistics Canada 2013) About 8% of boys and 4% of girls aged 6 to 17 met the current guidelines for MVPA . . . Younger children were more likely to have met the guidelines for MVPA than older children and youth for both boys and girls. Boys aged 6 to 11 were the most active (11% met the guidelines), while girls aged 12 to 17 were the least active (2% met the guidelines). (Statistics Canada 2013)
The reasons for this are manifold, including the constant lure of electronic media, lack of parental role modeling, and insistence on or opportunity for outdoor play. Children living in high-rise buildings in urban centers may have little access to outdoor spaces in which they can play creatively and independently. There is also fear of parents to letting their children go outside on their own. It is not just traffic that is seen as dangerous, but there seems to be a fear of strangers who may intend harm to their children.
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My grandsons, aged 4 and 7, live in Los Angeles. When I visited, I would pick them up from school, the younger one from his playschool, the older one from his elementary school. All of us parents or grandparents would assemble before the gates of the elementary school, the children line up with their teachers, and they are let go one by one as the teacher recognizes the adult who is entitled to pick up the child. By contrast, I do not remember ever having been escorted to any school, except for the very first day of my schooling when I was six years old. I would walk a fair distance, together with other children. Depending on where we lived, either my friend would ring the bell and I would run downstairs, or I would ring the bell and she would come out. Later on we cycled to school. This is how we went home, as well. This gave us time to talk with each other, without parental presence and supervision, and constituted physical activity at the same time. I believe it took me about 20 minutes to get to school. Going back and forth would therefore result in 40 minutes of “moderate to vigorous physical activity”—a fair start of reaching the one-hour goal that is currently specified. Driving children to school creates a vicious circle. A recent study looking at pedestrian collisions for children from the ages of 4 to 12 in Toronto found that there were 481 collisions involving children between 2002 and 2011 in Toronto. So the risk is not imaginary. However, Jennifer Keesmaat, Toronto’s chief planner, likened the situation to a “chicken and egg” situation, “the more kids walking to school, the safer it becomes” (Kane 2014:A2). According to her, the catch 22 situation is that “parents are both the solution and the problem.” Parents drive their children because they are concerned about accidents. By this act, they are actually increasing the traffic volume, which increases the risks of accidents (Kane 2014). Lack of Boredom I have long believed that one of our grievous losses is the disappearance of boredom. That may sound counterintuitive—but I believe that from boredom springs a lot of creativity.6 If children say “I am bored” and a parent or caregiver says, “then go find something to do” a child must draw on his or her own resources to find an activity she or he finds satisfying. It is a lot harder than turning on the TV, playing another computer game, or texting your friend. It requires contemplation: What would I actually enjoy at this moment? Is there something in my environment, when I look around, that I find interesting? What is in my environment? Boredom can (although it will not necessarily do so) lead to creative play—alone or with others. Yet today most children have access to ubiquitous electronic sources, which provide canned entertainment. The American Academy of Pediatrics estimates that “Today’s children are spending an average of seven hours 6.
This has been argued by Genevieve Bell (2011) for adults.
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a day on entertainment media, including televisions, computers, phones and other electronic devices” (American Academy of Pediatrics 2015). They recommend a maximum of two hours per day instead. I suggest that this means that children who use that much screen time will rarely experience the challenge of being bored and having to come up with inventive ways to spend their time—what unstructured time there is to begin with! Intensive Parenting Bonnie Fox (2014) describes intensive mothering for middle-class couples in her paper as “picking up babies the minute they cry, ensuring ageappropriate stimulation from infancy on, scheduling play dates and driving kids to various swimming, music, even tutoring lessons (and being heavily involved in their homework) as they move through the school years.” In the personal circles in which my son is involved, it would make more sense to talk about intensive parenting rather than intensive mothering, since the fathers—often separated or divorced from the mother of their children, and having 50 percent custody—follow the same pattern. Fox (2014) continues: “Middle-class families are also now cushioning the impact of an awful labour market on their young-adult kids, who stay home much longer than the previous generation because of longer years of education (and a dearth of cheap student dormitory housing), but also an economy not producing lots of good jobs and urban housing markets with very high rental costs.” Such parenting practices reinforce the dependence of children on their parents, rather than their independence.
CONCLUSION Turning back to what Canadian children will likely face when they are adults, what are the traits that would help them to deal with the challenging situation in which they will find themselves? They will need the capacity to deal with emergencies, they will need to be able to think independently and quickly but act cooperatively to cope with emergencies, they will need to have a lot of survival skills such as first aid, being able to grow food, cook, repair clothes, furniture, and machines, have technological knowledge that will allow them to convert one type of machine for other uses, they will need to be willing to learn and adapt to changing situations, in short, they need resilience—which includes physical and mental health as an important aspect. They will also require good knowledge of natural processes to be able to adapt to whatever the local weather will throw at them. Looking at current patterns, the likelihood that most of them will have these characteristics is not great. Confounding this already difficult scenario is the likelihood that the simple exposure to natural disasters may actually decrease resilience. A
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study looking at the effects of the Quebec ice storm in 1998 found that children who had been exposed in utero to this natural disaster had lower cognitive and language abilities, as measured at five years of age (Laplante et al. 2008). There will likely be some people who will cope well—those whose parents did not coddle them, who were, as children, physically active, mentally healthy, who learned to understand natural processes, had limited screen time, learned to be independent in their thoughts but able to cooperate well with others. They will likely have been children who were allowed to feel bored, and to invent their own constructive ways of coping with boredom. Children growing up in certain types of religious sects that maintain an agrarian lifestyle will likely also find it easier to cope. However, for the average North American child, I foresee a more challenging future with a diminished capacity of creatively and positively dealing with it. By now, the scientific consensus is that climate change has started and that it will inevitably continue. How dire the situation will be will depend on our political, economic, and social decisions now. The Canadian federal government under Prime Minister Harper is firmly committed to denying the reality of climate change and to continue to support those extractive industries that release the most greenhouse gases, such as the Alberta Tar Sands, while at the same time systematically muzzling scientists who are conducting critical research on these issues.7 If we truly loved our planet and our children, we would work to reverse these policies. But, given current trends, we need to prepare for difficult times. That includes reflecting critically about how we raise our children, and preparing them to become resilient adults capable of dealing with adverse circumstances, while hopefully still enjoying life.
References American Academy of Pediatrics. 2015. “Media and Children.” Retrieved January 3, 2015 (http://www.aap.org/en-us/advocacy-and-policy/aap-health-initiatives/pages/mediaand-children.aspx#sthash.6wChtCWi.dpuf). Bell, G. 2011. “The Value of Boredom: Genevieve Bell at TEDxSydney.” Retrieved January 3, 2015 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ps_YUElM2EQ). Fox, B. 2014. “Changing Families Viewed Through the Changing Lens of Gender.”Paper presented at Congress of the Canadian Sociological Association, May 26–30, Brock University, St. Catharines, Canada. Government of Alberta. 2014. “Benefits of Outdoor Play.” Retrieved April 2, 2014 (http://www. healthyalberta.com/729.htm). Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). 2014. “Climate Change 2014. Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability.” Retrieved April 2, 2014 (http://ipccwg2.gov/ AR5/images/uploads/IPCC_WG2AR5_SPM_Approved.pdf). 7.
See the Websites of Voices/Voix and Scientists for the Right to Know, among many others, for evidence.
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Irish, P. 2013. “Ontario Apples Rebound in a Bumper Crop.” Toronto Star, September 27. Retrieved April 2, 2014 (http://www.thestar.com/life/health_wellness/nutrition/ 2013/09/27/ontario_apples_rebound_in_a_bumper_crop.html). Kane, L. 2014. “Busy Streets Still Safe for Kids, Study Says.” Toronto Star, April 7, pp. A1, A2. Laplante, D.P., A. Brunet, N. Schmitz, A. Ciampi and S. King. 2008. “Project Ice Storm: Prenatal Maternal Stress Affects Cognitive and Linguistic Functioning in 5 1/2-Year-Old Children.” Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry 47(9):1063– 72. Retrieved April 4, 2014 (http://www.researchgate.net/publication/23135557_Project_ Ice_Storm_prenatal_maternal_stress_affects_cognitive_and_linguistic_functioning_in_5_12year-old_children). Louv, R. 2008. Last Child in the Woods. 2d ed. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books. Notzon, F.C., Y.M. Komarov, S.P. Ermakov, C.T. Sempos, J.S. Marks and E.V. Sempos. 1998. “Causes of Declining Life Expectancy in Russia.” Journal of the American Medical Association 279(10):793–800. Retrieved December 30, 2014 (http://www. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9508159). Statistics Canada. 2010. Cat. # 82-003-XPE. “Fitness of Canadian Children and Youth.” Health Reports 21(1):11. Retrieved April 2, 2014 (http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/82-003x/2010001/article/11065-eng.pdf). Statistics Canada. 2013. Catalogue no. 82-625-X, “Directly Measured Physical Activity of Canadian Children and Youth, 2007 to 2011.” Retrieved April 2, 2014 (http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/82-625-x/2013001/article/11817-eng.pdf). Statistics Canada. 2014a. “Births and Total Fertility Rate.” Retrieved April 8, 2014 (http://www.statcan.gc.ca/tables-tableaux/sum-som/l01/cst01/hlth85b-eng.htm). Statistics Canada. 2014b. “Making Fathers Count.” Retrieved April 8, 2014 (http://www.statcan. gc.ca/pub/11-008-x/2010002/article/11165-eng.htm#a4). Waddell, C., C.A. Shepherd, D.R. Offord and J.M. Hua. 2005. “A Public Health Strategy to Improve the Mental Health of Canadian Children.” Canadian Journal of Psychiatry 50:226–33. Retrieved April 2, 2014 (http://ww1.cpa-apc.org:8080/publications/ archives/cjp/2005/march2/Waddell-RP.asp). Westlund, S. 2014. “Making Contact.” Alternatives Journal 40(2). Retrieved April 8, 2015 (http://www.alternativesjournal.ca/science-and-solutions/making-contact).
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INTRODUCTION On December 21, 2013, there was a severe ice storm in Toronto, which knocked out power in parts of the city for days. Most people had their power restored within five days. I was out of the country at the time, and when I returned I asked my friends whether they had experienced a power outage and if so, how they had coped with it. Here are the stories of two of my friends, both highly intelligent women in their 50s. One friend said: Oh, it wasn’t too bad – actually, we had a blast. I roasted a turkey on the BBQ, invited a whole lot of friends, and asked them to bring a duvet in which to wrap themselves. We sat around the fireplace, took pictures of how ridiculous we looked, ate, told stories and had a great time.
The second friend took a different perspective, stating: Well, it was difficult. Between me and my daughter, we had $40.- I tried to drive, but the lights were down and the traffic was wild, so I stayed home. The ATMs in my area were all out, so we lived on the $40.- for the 5 days we were without power. For Christmas, we shared a Subway sandwich. After three days in the cold, I realized that my judgement was no longer functioning properly. It took us a while to recover from the experience.
Both women have good jobs, and have good social networks. One behaved in a resilient fashion, the other did not.
Margrit Eichler, OISE/University of Toronto, 252 Bloor Street West, Toronto, ON M5S 1V6, Canada. E-mail: [email protected]
C 2015 Canadian Sociological Association/La Soci´ et´e canadienne de sociologie
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233
Resilience1 refers to the ability to become strong, healthy, or successful again after something bad happens,2 to be able to withstand or recover quickly from difficult conditions.3 This is the most important characteristic I believe our children and grandchildren will need during their lifetimes, as will their children, and grandchildren, and great grandchildren, etc., into the foreseeable future, due to climate change.
CLIMATE CHANGE By now, the scientific consensus is that climate change is inevitable, that it has already started, and that it will get very much worse in the future. How much worse, no one can tell, but at least four points can be stated with some certainty.4 First, there will be many more severe weather events: coastal flooding and inland flooding, ice storms, prolonged snow storms, mud slides, inundations, droughts, hurricanes, cyclones, heat waves, wildfires, and more. Second, natural catastrophes affect people in the region in which the catastrophes happen most, but they also have a cumulative effect on the entire country. In the wake of many catastrophes, the physical infrastructure (electricity, drinking water, streets, houses, etc.) is affected, but as incidences of natural disasters rise, so will be the social infrastructure. Third, with rapidly changing weather, food production will be affected—within Canada and the United States, but also internationally. For example, in 2012, 85 percent of Ontario’s apple crop was wiped out because of the weather (Irish 2013). Damaged crops will result in higher food prices and a corresponding increase in food insecurity for the poorer segments of society. A final point is that inequality in Canada has dramatically increased. Unless this trend gets reversed soon, more of the poor—especially Indigenous people, women, children, and people with disabilities—will simply die earlier. We have seen this effect when the Soviet Union dissolved. In the wake of the social turmoil this originated, life expectancy dropped dramatically. Between 1990 and 1994, life expectancy for Russian men declined from 63.8 to 57.7 years and for women from 74.4 to 71.2 years (Notzon et al. 1998). Internationally, North America will not be the region in the world that will suffer the most from climate change in the short run. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC 2014), Asia will be most affected, but looking at already visible effects, Africa and Latin America are next in line to suffer substantially. That means that 1.
As applied to people.
2.
Merriam-Webster definition.
3.
Oxford Dictionary.
4.
I am relying on the IPCC Report no. 5 (IPCC 2014) as the basis of my predictions.
234
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those countries that contributed least to our current situation in terms of greenhouse gas emissions are going to experience the brunt of the negative effects earlier and more savagely than those countries that contributed most. That mirrors the situation of the poor within our own country: having contributed least to the problem, they will suffer the consequences first and experience them more brutally than those of us who contribute to the problem more. Eventually, the consequences will reach all of us, but there will likely be a time delay. Many of the Third World countries have a high number of relatively young people, who are likely to procreate, as young people do. My assumption is that there will be many who will blame North America, and who will want to export some of the suffering they experience to us. This will mean increased international turmoil, suicide attacks, maybe mass attacks. Likely, the rich will want to stay in gated communities that will exacerbate class distinctions. Resource wars will be going on. All of this is going to affect the world economic system, which will eventually crash. We will be thrown back onto our own resources: human, social, ecological, and economic, while dealing with an increasingly hostile natural environment that will throw one curveball after the other at humanity. The turmoil in the natural weather will therefore be matched by turmoil in the social, economic, and political systems. In other words—our children and grandchildren can look forward to a future with much sociopolitical instability, much reduced resources to deal with much more serious problems than the ones with which my generation had to cope. Unless they are very rich, their collective as well as individual living standards will be drastically reduced compared to what we are enjoying now. In order to survive and maybe even flourish under such circumstances, they will require a great degree of resilience.
THE FAMILY OF THE FUTURE Let us speculate what the family of children born today might look like. Parents will be older. In 1974, just under 20 percent of all mothers were 30 years and older, in 2010, just over 50 percent were in that age category. The age of fathers has gone up as well. “In 1995, nearly 44% of fathers were in their thirties and 36% were in their forties. Some ten years later, the situation was reversed: 33% were aged 30 to 39 and 44% were in their forties. Additionally, the proportion of fathers in their fifties increased from 10% in 1995 to 15% in 2006” (Statistics Canada 2014b).5 Many of the children will likely have experienced the divorce of their parents, or were born to an unmarried woman. In 2011, the fertility rate in Canada was 1.61 (Statistics Canada 2014a). Although there will be
5.
These data are from 2006. Likely the age of fathers has continued to increase.
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extended family members for most, the numbers will be smaller than in times when the fertility rate was higher. Since the parents will be older, their parents will be older as well, meaning that grandparents will be alive for a shorter span of their grandchildren’s lives, therefore less practical help can be expected from the older generation to the younger generation and vice versa, as older parents cope with young children and their own aged parents. By the time children born today are 30, and probably before then, they will have to cope with at least some of the turmoil that I have briefly outlined above. For us at this point in time, it is just barely foreshadowed. In order to survive and even do well in the tumultuous and difficult times they will experience, these adults will have to have enormous resilience, the capacity to think and act independently while cooperating with others, inventiveness, good health and stamina, the ability to do more with less. They will need practical skills such as gardening, cooking, preserving, repairing, and maybe making garments, fixing things that are broken— skills that my parents learned from their own parents, but that few adults possess today to pass on to their children.
WHAT IS THE LIKELIHOOD OF THEIR RESILIENCE? Resilience is a multifaceted phenomenon. Here are some of the issues that seem most pertinent in this context. Health I will look at current patterns to extrapolate into the future. The most basic issue is health. If the health is compromised, everything else becomes more difficult. “At any given time, 14% of children aged 4 to 17 years (over 800 000 in Canada) experience clinically important mental disorders, but fewer than 25% of these children receive specialized treatment services” (Waddell et al. 2005). Between 1981 and 2007/2009, the health of Canadian children deteriorated markedly. According to Statistics Canada (2010), The results demonstrate a significant deterioration since 1981, regardless of sex or age. In particular, muscular strength and flexibility have decreased, and all measures of adiposity have increased. Children are taller, heavier, fatter and weaker than in 1981. Previous research predicts that a population decline in fitness, as observed here, may result in accelerated noncommunicable disease development, increased health care cost, and loss of future productivity.
To pick just one specific aspect in this overall picture, “The percentage classified as overweight or obese rose from 14% to 31% among boys, and
236
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from 14% to 25% among girls” (Statistics Canada 2010:7). The authors also note that fitness may have been overestimated due to the method chosen. CTV reported on March 27, 2014, that an American study found an increase of autism-related disorders from 1 in 150 in 2007 to 1 in 68 “now,” and that these numbers are comparable to Canadian numbers. Even though some of this increase may be due to more children being diagnosed as having this disorder, the numbers are very worrying. In terms of health, we are producing a significant number of children who are unlikely to be highly resilient. Unsupervised Outdoors Play and Activities Louv (2008) argues that children are suffering from “nature deficit disorder,” the “broken bond between our young and nature” (p. 3), which results in “diminished use of the senses, attention difficulties and higher rates of emotional and physical illnesses” (p. 36). Play outside is widely recognized as providing many benefits, including giving children a chance to burn off energy, calm them and recharge their energy levels, help them understand and interact with the natural world, provide them with opportunities for more social interaction with peers, help develop their powers of observation and their assessment of risk, offer opportunities for creativity and free play, and increase their physical health (Government of Alberta 2014). The healing properties of interacting with nature for adults have been explored in a number of contexts (Westlund 2014). So how much time are children spending outside, either playing or walking or in other forms of physical activity? The recommended time for Canadian children and youth for “moderate to vigorous physical activity” (MVPA) is 60 minutes per day. (Statistics Canada 2013) About 8% of boys and 4% of girls aged 6 to 17 met the current guidelines for MVPA . . . Younger children were more likely to have met the guidelines for MVPA than older children and youth for both boys and girls. Boys aged 6 to 11 were the most active (11% met the guidelines), while girls aged 12 to 17 were the least active (2% met the guidelines). (Statistics Canada 2013)
The reasons for this are manifold, including the constant lure of electronic media, lack of parental role modeling, and insistence on or opportunity for outdoor play. Children living in high-rise buildings in urban centers may have little access to outdoor spaces in which they can play creatively and independently. There is also fear of parents to letting their children go outside on their own. It is not just traffic that is seen as dangerous, but there seems to be a fear of strangers who may intend harm to their children.
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My grandsons, aged 4 and 7, live in Los Angeles. When I visited, I would pick them up from school, the younger one from his playschool, the older one from his elementary school. All of us parents or grandparents would assemble before the gates of the elementary school, the children line up with their teachers, and they are let go one by one as the teacher recognizes the adult who is entitled to pick up the child. By contrast, I do not remember ever having been escorted to any school, except for the very first day of my schooling when I was six years old. I would walk a fair distance, together with other children. Depending on where we lived, either my friend would ring the bell and I would run downstairs, or I would ring the bell and she would come out. Later on we cycled to school. This is how we went home, as well. This gave us time to talk with each other, without parental presence and supervision, and constituted physical activity at the same time. I believe it took me about 20 minutes to get to school. Going back and forth would therefore result in 40 minutes of “moderate to vigorous physical activity”—a fair start of reaching the one-hour goal that is currently specified. Driving children to school creates a vicious circle. A recent study looking at pedestrian collisions for children from the ages of 4 to 12 in Toronto found that there were 481 collisions involving children between 2002 and 2011 in Toronto. So the risk is not imaginary. However, Jennifer Keesmaat, Toronto’s chief planner, likened the situation to a “chicken and egg” situation, “the more kids walking to school, the safer it becomes” (Kane 2014:A2). According to her, the catch 22 situation is that “parents are both the solution and the problem.” Parents drive their children because they are concerned about accidents. By this act, they are actually increasing the traffic volume, which increases the risks of accidents (Kane 2014). Lack of Boredom I have long believed that one of our grievous losses is the disappearance of boredom. That may sound counterintuitive—but I believe that from boredom springs a lot of creativity.6 If children say “I am bored” and a parent or caregiver says, “then go find something to do” a child must draw on his or her own resources to find an activity she or he finds satisfying. It is a lot harder than turning on the TV, playing another computer game, or texting your friend. It requires contemplation: What would I actually enjoy at this moment? Is there something in my environment, when I look around, that I find interesting? What is in my environment? Boredom can (although it will not necessarily do so) lead to creative play—alone or with others. Yet today most children have access to ubiquitous electronic sources, which provide canned entertainment. The American Academy of Pediatrics estimates that “Today’s children are spending an average of seven hours 6.
This has been argued by Genevieve Bell (2011) for adults.
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a day on entertainment media, including televisions, computers, phones and other electronic devices” (American Academy of Pediatrics 2015). They recommend a maximum of two hours per day instead. I suggest that this means that children who use that much screen time will rarely experience the challenge of being bored and having to come up with inventive ways to spend their time—what unstructured time there is to begin with! Intensive Parenting Bonnie Fox (2014) describes intensive mothering for middle-class couples in her paper as “picking up babies the minute they cry, ensuring ageappropriate stimulation from infancy on, scheduling play dates and driving kids to various swimming, music, even tutoring lessons (and being heavily involved in their homework) as they move through the school years.” In the personal circles in which my son is involved, it would make more sense to talk about intensive parenting rather than intensive mothering, since the fathers—often separated or divorced from the mother of their children, and having 50 percent custody—follow the same pattern. Fox (2014) continues: “Middle-class families are also now cushioning the impact of an awful labour market on their young-adult kids, who stay home much longer than the previous generation because of longer years of education (and a dearth of cheap student dormitory housing), but also an economy not producing lots of good jobs and urban housing markets with very high rental costs.” Such parenting practices reinforce the dependence of children on their parents, rather than their independence.
CONCLUSION Turning back to what Canadian children will likely face when they are adults, what are the traits that would help them to deal with the challenging situation in which they will find themselves? They will need the capacity to deal with emergencies, they will need to be able to think independently and quickly but act cooperatively to cope with emergencies, they will need to have a lot of survival skills such as first aid, being able to grow food, cook, repair clothes, furniture, and machines, have technological knowledge that will allow them to convert one type of machine for other uses, they will need to be willing to learn and adapt to changing situations, in short, they need resilience—which includes physical and mental health as an important aspect. They will also require good knowledge of natural processes to be able to adapt to whatever the local weather will throw at them. Looking at current patterns, the likelihood that most of them will have these characteristics is not great. Confounding this already difficult scenario is the likelihood that the simple exposure to natural disasters may actually decrease resilience. A
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study looking at the effects of the Quebec ice storm in 1998 found that children who had been exposed in utero to this natural disaster had lower cognitive and language abilities, as measured at five years of age (Laplante et al. 2008). There will likely be some people who will cope well—those whose parents did not coddle them, who were, as children, physically active, mentally healthy, who learned to understand natural processes, had limited screen time, learned to be independent in their thoughts but able to cooperate well with others. They will likely have been children who were allowed to feel bored, and to invent their own constructive ways of coping with boredom. Children growing up in certain types of religious sects that maintain an agrarian lifestyle will likely also find it easier to cope. However, for the average North American child, I foresee a more challenging future with a diminished capacity of creatively and positively dealing with it. By now, the scientific consensus is that climate change has started and that it will inevitably continue. How dire the situation will be will depend on our political, economic, and social decisions now. The Canadian federal government under Prime Minister Harper is firmly committed to denying the reality of climate change and to continue to support those extractive industries that release the most greenhouse gases, such as the Alberta Tar Sands, while at the same time systematically muzzling scientists who are conducting critical research on these issues.7 If we truly loved our planet and our children, we would work to reverse these policies. But, given current trends, we need to prepare for difficult times. That includes reflecting critically about how we raise our children, and preparing them to become resilient adults capable of dealing with adverse circumstances, while hopefully still enjoying life.
References American Academy of Pediatrics. 2015. “Media and Children.” Retrieved January 3, 2015 (http://www.aap.org/en-us/advocacy-and-policy/aap-health-initiatives/pages/mediaand-children.aspx#sthash.6wChtCWi.dpuf). Bell, G. 2011. “The Value of Boredom: Genevieve Bell at TEDxSydney.” Retrieved January 3, 2015 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ps_YUElM2EQ). Fox, B. 2014. “Changing Families Viewed Through the Changing Lens of Gender.”Paper presented at Congress of the Canadian Sociological Association, May 26–30, Brock University, St. Catharines, Canada. Government of Alberta. 2014. “Benefits of Outdoor Play.” Retrieved April 2, 2014 (http://www. healthyalberta.com/729.htm). Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). 2014. “Climate Change 2014. Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability.” Retrieved April 2, 2014 (http://ipccwg2.gov/ AR5/images/uploads/IPCC_WG2AR5_SPM_Approved.pdf). 7.
See the Websites of Voices/Voix and Scientists for the Right to Know, among many others, for evidence.
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Irish, P. 2013. “Ontario Apples Rebound in a Bumper Crop.” Toronto Star, September 27. Retrieved April 2, 2014 (http://www.thestar.com/life/health_wellness/nutrition/ 2013/09/27/ontario_apples_rebound_in_a_bumper_crop.html). Kane, L. 2014. “Busy Streets Still Safe for Kids, Study Says.” Toronto Star, April 7, pp. A1, A2. Laplante, D.P., A. Brunet, N. Schmitz, A. Ciampi and S. King. 2008. “Project Ice Storm: Prenatal Maternal Stress Affects Cognitive and Linguistic Functioning in 5 1/2-Year-Old Children.” Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry 47(9):1063– 72. Retrieved April 4, 2014 (http://www.researchgate.net/publication/23135557_Project_ Ice_Storm_prenatal_maternal_stress_affects_cognitive_and_linguistic_functioning_in_5_12year-old_children). Louv, R. 2008. Last Child in the Woods. 2d ed. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books. Notzon, F.C., Y.M. Komarov, S.P. Ermakov, C.T. Sempos, J.S. Marks and E.V. Sempos. 1998. “Causes of Declining Life Expectancy in Russia.” Journal of the American Medical Association 279(10):793–800. Retrieved December 30, 2014 (http://www. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9508159). Statistics Canada. 2010. Cat. # 82-003-XPE. “Fitness of Canadian Children and Youth.” Health Reports 21(1):11. Retrieved April 2, 2014 (http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/82-003x/2010001/article/11065-eng.pdf). Statistics Canada. 2013. Catalogue no. 82-625-X, “Directly Measured Physical Activity of Canadian Children and Youth, 2007 to 2011.” Retrieved April 2, 2014 (http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/82-625-x/2013001/article/11817-eng.pdf). Statistics Canada. 2014a. “Births and Total Fertility Rate.” Retrieved April 8, 2014 (http://www.statcan.gc.ca/tables-tableaux/sum-som/l01/cst01/hlth85b-eng.htm). Statistics Canada. 2014b. “Making Fathers Count.” Retrieved April 8, 2014 (http://www.statcan. gc.ca/pub/11-008-x/2010002/article/11165-eng.htm#a4). Waddell, C., C.A. Shepherd, D.R. Offord and J.M. Hua. 2005. “A Public Health Strategy to Improve the Mental Health of Canadian Children.” Canadian Journal of Psychiatry 50:226–33. Retrieved April 2, 2014 (http://ww1.cpa-apc.org:8080/publications/ archives/cjp/2005/march2/Waddell-RP.asp). Westlund, S. 2014. “Making Contact.” Alternatives Journal 40(2). Retrieved April 8, 2015 (http://www.alternativesjournal.ca/science-and-solutions/making-contact).
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