Why are they falling in the river?

We are putting in a tremendous amount of effort pulling the kids out of the river. Time, energy, money, thought, and resources spent pulling tweens, adolescents, and young adults out of some very scary waters. The river, of course, is a metaphor. It’s one you’ve likely heard before where there is trouble upstream but we’re so busy pulling folks out downstream that we can’t even get to danger or we don’t know how to stop it. The dangers here being eco-anxiety, anger, suicidal ideation, depression, mental instability, fear, dread, apathy, obesity, inflammation, and all the things that studies show our young people are battling as a result of a planet in peril.

I’m quite surprised that we haven’t figured out how to work together to stop everyone from falling in. In fact, it’s utterly astonishing to me that in the many circles of caring for our Mother Earth and humanity’s future that there are so few voices who speak out and give our youngest children the attention they deserve. The very young kids of today will be the tweens and adolescents of tomorrow, and if we do not do something different now, then we are going to continue to repeat the past and spend our days pulling the people out downstream when we could have kept them from falling in upstream in the first place.

I am a mom. I was a kid. I see and I feel the world we are living in shifting. It’s scary. It’s heartbreaking. It’s divisive. Yet, it’s not the world so much that creates the fear and sorrow but our collective reaction to our inability to change. We know we’ve got problems. They show up in our health, our sleep, our attentions, our addictions. Our political views are impenetrable. Our devices dictate our relationships. We mask our feelings and we numb our discomfort. We talk and talk and talk about it all—a lot. We give speeches and we host webinars and we present at events and we write endless blogs, just like this one. We’re even exploring artificial connections! We’re victims of infobesity and it’s killing our ability to respond to reality and be role models of healthy behaviors and harmonious living for our children.

I don’t know who is going to say it, so I will.

This is not “the river,” but it was an uncomfortable and fun experience that we hope to have more of.

For the majority of children, an education or awareness of our natural environment and the impact that humans have on it comes far too late. Teaching a fourth grader, for example, about life on our planet and their role in it is an uphill battle. It’s developmentally too late, behaviorally too late, and socially too late. That fourth grader is past their formative years and they don’t have a whole lot of space in their brain and time in their life to build a whole new foundation of understanding. There is a reason that we introduce children to letters and numbers at a very young age. They are foundational to learning and will soon be tools to shape a child’s life. Our relationship with our environment should be no different. We have anxious kids, blissfully unaware adults, and a mental health epidemic because the connection to all that is around us and within us is introduced far too late.

For every climate activist and environmental organization out there doing the good work, I do not believe you will see the future you want unless you include the impact your work has on very young children. We must rise above our fears of “burdening” children with responsibility and rise to the occasion of setting the best foundation we know how to in order to “entrust” these future generations to steward our home planet better than we have.

Perhaps had we been encouraging and including young children and their schools in environmental literacy the way we have included them in the digital world, athleticism, and career readiness (to name a few), we would not be feverishly pulling out folks downstream.

Let’s stop the nonsense. Let’s one by one find some ways to make the riverbanks upstream safer. Let’s rewild our children and ready them for living life.