A guide to talk to your kids about existential threats and tough real world topics like climate change, war, pandemics, and more, in order to create a healthy home, and process your emotions so that you can take meaningful action.
Everyone-especially young children, teenagers and young adults-now reports higher levels of anxiety than ever before. Yet there's no playbook for parenting today. From the climate crisis to gun violence to political upheaval to racism, parenting in these times means bearing witness to chronic levels of uncertainty amidst societal and planetary transformation. Many are succumbing to fears and despair by becoming cynical "Doomers" (those who are extremely pessimistic or fatalist about global problems such as climate change and pollution).
In Raising Anti‑Doomers, psychotherapist Ariella Cook‑Shonkoff reveals that Doomerism is nothing more than fear or despair gone wild. We have a choice in breeding this response further into our culture-or not. Her book helps parents help themselves, and in doing so, help children, and future generations. By guiding parents through emotional reflections and reckonings, supporting the development of a personal climate identity and moving towards action and engagement as individuals and families, this book offers hope at a time when we are desperately in need. Ultimately, when we reset our parenting dials to respond to present day needs and circumstances, we breathe hope back into the world, in the form of raising resilient generations to come.
Ariella Cook-Shonkoff is an art therapist and licensed psychotherapist based in Berkeley, CA. She works with children, teens, parents, and young adults on a range of issues from anxiety to trauma to low self-esteem to life transitions.
