Another on-the-fly post because I need to be working.
Three immediate things
Anxiety referrals through the roof for kids – Guardian reports
- NHS referrals for anxiety in children more than double pre-Covid levels
- ‘Jaw-dropping’ number of children in England with anxiety shocks even professionals
Second – someone who tweets up a necessary storm about climate breakdown/apocalypse/emergency whatever wrote –
Suprised we haven’t seen more mass demonstrations from young people seeing as things are getting worse and 2023 was the hottest year on record. This was 2019. Covid seems to have collapsed the momentum.
To reply, I dug out this old article from 2021 by Claire Hymer, for Novara Media – Whatever Happened to the UK Youth Climate Strikes?
And in my search for it had found this from Politico, from June – Whatever happened to the climate kids?
Look, the kids of 2018-19 were used by adults as either
a) something to have power over/to condescend to – lecturing them about ‘getting an education’ etc so they (the condescenders) could feel responsible, ‘adult’ when in fact they were scared and irresponsible children in adult bodies (if you were a ‘journalist’ (i.e. neoliberal shill) you could get a few hundred lazy words for a column out of this.
b) something to block their own sense of failure/shame at never having taken serious action themselves. Cheering on from the side lines as “the kids sorted it out” also allowed them to manage their own emotions of failure, culpability and weakness. These people were basically sub-contracting out their responsibility, dumping it on the most powerless and vulnerable. Classy.
There was a vanishingly small third category (which I tried to be in, without much [any?] success) – of adults trying to offer practical support – drafting/revising open letters, facilitation skills, arrest advice etc. Trying to offer this while dreading-and-knowing-and-dreading that it would all amount to nothing, be gone like a fist when you open your palm because the kids were EVEN MORE prone to the boom-and-bust [emota]cycle than the soi-disant adults. (1)
Verdict: the GretaXR wave (yes, I am trying to make ‘GretaXR’ happen), is over. Nothing was learned by those in that wave from previous waves. Nothing will be learned from any future waves from the failure of the GretaXR wave.
[To be 100% clear – I am not ‘blaming’ Greta or the kids for their failure. There is blame, but it attaches to the ‘adults’ (again with the scare quotes, I know, but just because you’re 30 or 50 or 70 doesn’t mean you are actually an adult). They are the ones who didn’t act when there was something meaningful to be done. They are the ones who didn’t pass on skills, knowledge, tradecraft, perspectives, relationships, and allowed the whole sorry Groundhog Day to unfold again.]
Footnotes
(1) There’s also vulture extractivist academics building careers on this shit. But of that another day perhaps.
marchudson.net 
Marc, you are so right, children are for the most part a reflection of their parents. In the formative years it’s a case of “monkey see, monkey do”, after, it’s often an environmental issue.
Children are our future and should be treated as such.