Why is climate change now cropping up in peoples’ thoughts around family planning? In a recent global survey, more than 39% of young people reported climate change was making them feel hesitant about having children of their own. And this echoes similar reports for adults in the USA, Canada, New Zealand, and Europe: Those more worried about climate change say they’re less inclined to have children. Over the last half century, more of us have been choosing to remain child free – particularly in the Northern hemisphere. There are a range of reasons for this – better rights for women, but also a desire to be freer from responsibility. And financial worries rear their head when deciding whether we want to become a parent – especially, according to the research, amongst men. But why climate change?
One reason may be a desire to limit the amount of danger we, and those we love, are exposed to. The psychological theory of risk homeostasis proposes we constantly try to regulate the among of jeopardy in our lives – to keep it at some acceptable overall level. Vicky is a 38 year-old NHS worker who has, by her own admission, a strong stance on having children in the age of climate change. She told me “The more that I read and see into the climate crisis and everything that’s potentially coming in the future, it leaves me with personally quite a bleak outlook…I feel that bringing a child into world at this point is maybe more for your own feeling of satisfaction – or this historical thing where we’ve always been taught that we need to leave a legacy.”
Vicky described how she saw the world we would be leaving behind for future generations, and how she felt better knowing her children would not be living in it. “They’re going to be living in such awful conditions,” she told me. “It’s going to have a massive impact on their long-term futures. I just don’t see it as something that I could actually put anything I care through. So I’d much rather take my care, my energy, my capacity, and just put it into looking after other people that I can directly affect and that I can do the best by. But I have zero guilt having no children. I have no issue with never having children. I feel actually a sense of peace knowing that that will never be my outcome. And I’m comfortable with that. I see it as there’s 8 million people that roam this planet. It really doesn’t matter if I don’t have a child. For me, I’ll sleep better knowing that I’ll never do that.”
Vicky may feel she has little control over whether the world wakes up to climate change and acts in time, but she can reduce overall jeopardy by choosing not to have children – and eliminate the risk of seeing her children suffer. This type of risk homeostasis sounds like common sense – if the future is already becoming more risky, why add to that risk by starting a family? And Vicky is not alone in this response to an insecure future. It has helped explain the decline of birth rates before and during the Great Depression of the 1930s and, more recently, the energy crisis of the 1970s.
On the basis of risk homeostasis, you might wonder whether anyone who feels passionately about climate change would still decide to have a child. My friend and colleague Loz appeared to feel the same way as Vicky when I met her a few years ago. She recalled that time: “Certainly in 2019, I was at the height of my involvement really with various climate activist group, particularly extinction rebellion, and really quite in the depths of despair with the state of the world – as I think quite a lot of people were. It was a big moment of reckoning. I think that 2018 IPCC report had really kind of brought some things home to people. And I just couldn’t imagine at that time bringing a child into the world.”
In addition to the question of how your children will fare in a warming world, it also likely that having a family will contribute to that warming. If you care about the impact of your personal emissions, there are, of course, lots of other lifestyle changes you can make to reduce them. Some of the best things you can do are to go vegetarian, give up your car and avoid plane travel. That would save 4.6 tonnes of CO2 a year. But, if you decided to have one less child – that would save over 58 tonnes or more of CO2 a year – that’s well over 10 times more than doing all those other things put together.
But the increase in emissions associated with having children didn’t seem to be the major issue for Vicky and Loz. And the research tends to confirm that its more about the child’s experience rather than their impact on the environment, that is causing some of us to hesitate about having children in the time of climate change. In a recent study in Hungary, for example, women discussed their decision-making more in terms of the future of any prospective children rather than their potential carbon footprint.
Of course, there are some reasons why climate change might make us more inclined to have children. If those who care about the environment stop having families, then presumably they’ll be less pro-environmental child-rearing – and fewer green-thinking citizens to protect our planet in the future. I suggested this to Vicky, who pointed out that being environmentally aware might also add to a child’s anxieties in a future where the environment was becoming depleted:
“That, for me, is almost going: ‘I’m super aware that you are going have a really difficult time and that’s going be your burden. I’ve lived through a good, calm, mostly peaceful environment with this not being a concern. I recognize it’s a concern. It’s probably going be an issue. It’s on your shoulders. Good luck with that.’ I see it still as incredibly self-serving in a way that I’m not doing the best by my child by only making them more anxious and stressed and aware and hypervigilant, like I am, of what potentially is coming. But it’s that they have to grow up and try and find purpose within that extra awareness and stress around what their future might hold. So, no – I see it as more responsible still by avoiding having a child, knowing what I know.”
Are there any other reasons why having children might be good for climate change? At least thinking about children does make us think about the future – which might encourage potential parents to become more environmental in their thinking. Surely that’s a good thing? Certainly, there does seem a connection between thinking about the future and our environmental attitudes, and neuroscience is helping is to understand more about this connection.
Thinking about the future activates a region of the brain called the Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex (VMPFC). It was in this brain region that scientists in Geneva observed increased activation when they asked people to view a series of imaginary events, all of which showed the potential consequences of climate change that we may experience in this century (around 2080). The VMPFC is an important region of the brain for affective foresight – our ability to imagine how we might feel in the future. It’s been shown that activation here in this lower region towards the front of the brain better predicts whether we’ll do something than whether we just say we will. It’s as if thinking about how we’ll feel after we have or haven’t carried out an action is the key to forming an authentic intention to actually do it. If having children makes us think about the future, then parenting might lead to a greater awareness of climate change, more VMPFC activation, and more environmental behaviour.
Thinking about the future activates a region of the brain called the Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex (VMPFC). It was in this brain region that scientists in Geneva observed increased activation when they asked people to view a series of imaginary events, all of which showed the potential consequences of climate change that we may experience in this century (around 2080). The VMPFC supports our affective foresight – our ability to imagine how we might feel in the future. It’s been shown that activation here better predicts whether we’ll do something than whether we just say we will. It’s as if thinking about how we’ll feel after we have or haven’t carried out an action is the key to forming an authentic intention to actually do it. If having children makes us think about the future, then parenting might lead to a greater awareness of climate change, more VMPFC activation, and more environmental behaviour. A Swedish survey of more 3500 people showed parents did worry more than non-parents about climate change, and they also felt more guilty when doing things they thought might damage the environment. But – this may not be the effect of parenting – it could, instead, be what a self-selection effect (i.e. it’s people with pro-environmental attitudes selecting to become parents). When we think about having children, the dominant value system seems to be about others rather than self. And we know that concern for environment is also linked to self-transcendence. In the brain study in Geneva, it was the individuals with high self-transcendence who activated their VMPFC more when they thought about the year 2080
So, it may be that adults who are already pro-environmental may be more likely to have children, rather than having a family bringing about any change in attitudes. This appears to be the case in New Zealand, where researchers found parenting increased beliefs in the reality of climate change but not other environmental attitudes. A similar study in the UK showed only those parents with an already high environmental concern improved their green intentions further after their first child. And, of course, intentions are one thing but, when you have your first child, there’s a lot of stuff to think about other than the environment. Indeed, it’s been found that the pressures of being a new parent can lead to greater emissions through falling back on convenience food and using the car more. Basically – it is really difficult to make rearing children a netzero process!
Like Vicky, Loz hadn’t felt attracted to having a family in a future that was being made so uncertain by our deteriorating environment. “It just felt, I suppose just wrong, unethical, inhumane perhaps,” she told me, “I was that despondent.” This is how Loz recalled her feelings a few years previously, but she was now 8 months pregnant. “You know, I couldn’t really see things getting better,” she told me, “Which is interesting because I don’t think things have got better. Yet somehow here I am.”
When I asked Loz what changed her mind, she recalled the pandemic and listening to the daily toll. “There was just a bit of a shift of perspective,” she explained, “in terms of what felt important – which isn’t to say that the climate crisis felt less important, not at all. But I think perhaps maybe I’d throw myself so into climate activism in 2019 that I kind of lost some focus on other things that really do matter. Like, you know, family and friends and the sort of like immediate relationships and activities around you. I think the kind of big existential threat was sort of dominating everything for a while.”
“I think my involvement in environmental activism at that time was detrimental to some of my relationships. I probably didn’t prioritize some of the people around me because the sort of taking part in actions felt like the most important thing – because it really did, you know, it felt like this is life or death. Whereas then in 2020 when you’re sort of, well, you’re faced with life or death in a different sense.”
“I suppose the climate crisis is still this huge looming thing, but it’s not as immediate as people around you potentially being ill. And, somehow, I think that did shift my way of thinking to more of a local focus ….it was just a whole re-evaluation of priorities.”
You might think that the mortality figures announced daily during the pandemic would have added to Loz’s uncertainty about the future and made it less likely that she’d think about having a child. That’s what researchers in Poland would have thought before they analysed their data on climate change attitudes. They had been testing something called “terror management theory” – reasoning that those with a greater fear of death would want to have children less, in order to avoid their suffering due to global warming. This sounds similar to the “risk homeostasis” idea we came across earlier. But they found those with a greater fear of death wanted to have children more in the face of climate change. The researchers concluded people saw having children as a remedy for their existential fear, with future children as a type of legacy that would make it more likely some aspect of their lives would endure. And actually, when experiencing an environment that’s as uncertain and insecure as a conflict zone – where there is a daily life and death struggle to survive, fertility rates can sometimes increase – due to a range of reasons but including this type of psychological factor.
I visited Loz a few weeks later to see how mother and child were getting on. Her difficulties securing a nursery place, which she’d been told was due to staffing difficulty, had prompted some additional reflections she wanted to share. “I just feel like there’s this whole other argument missing,” she told me, “which is that people in this country are not having enough babies. Our population is declining and we’re going to have a smaller, older population and no one look after the older generations and do the jobs that need to be done….. We need to be having babies because otherwise we’re going to have a huge hole in our job market.”
So just a quick fact check here: The UK population – which is predicted to continue ageing – has actually been growing, albeit slowly. Last year the growth was only about 1% but that was largely due to migration rather than birth rate. Indeed, as Loz suggests, birth rates have been dropping and, unless migration to the UK continues, the UK population is expected to start shrinking in the 2030’s. In many respects the UK resembles other developed countries with their slowly growing or even declining populations. And yet….it’s the high consumption in these developed countries that is principally driving the human contribution to climate change. In other words, consumerism rather than population growth might be a more suitable target for our concerns over climate – with the faster-growing populations in less developed countries contributing a much smaller fraction to global emissions.
As we spoke, I felt having a child had effected Loz in the same way as those other parents who already had a high environmental concerns – her green intentions had been strengthened further rather than weakened. “I suppose,” she reflected, “there is also something about having a baby that really gives me this sense of being, being a link in a chain. You see this line of mothers going back before you and stretching ahead of you and you are just this one little link. Think of all the women that have had to go through childbirth so that you can be here and then you know the line that will carry on from you…..It gives you that sense the world isn’t ours…we are just so temporary on this planet…you really gain that perspective, I think, when having a child – and we’ve got to protect it for the future generations and not leave it all up to them to clear above mess.“
Researching this topic has filled me with great respect for those who, for environmental reasons, have decided to have smaller families or no children at all – and I certainly don’t believe anyone should feel guilty when they make such a personal decision – whatever they decide. At the same time, what I’ve learnt hasn’t made me feel more uncomfortable about my own decision 30 years ago to have kids. Having a family does feel like an act of faith in the future – but perhaps one that should make us think more about the environment on which that that future will depend.
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