My patients are suffering. Not in the way children are frightened of the dark, or of dogs, or of needles, but by what is happening in the world they are growing up in.
They have watched their towns flood. They have stayed home from school because the air outside was dangerous to breathe. They have lain awake on hot nights that used to be cool ones, in a country that is different to the one their parents grew up in.
As a child and adolescent psychiatrist, I have spent years trying to understand what is driving the rise in mental distress I see in young Australians.
Recently, a conservative think tank, the Institute of Public Affairs, argued in a report that teaching climate change in schools may be reinforcing distress in our children.
Is climate education making things worse?
My own published research, a time-series analysis of every youth mental health emergency presentation across New South Wales, found that on hotter days, more children and teenagers present to emergency departments in acute psychological distress, including suicidal thoughts. The effect starts at moderate temperatures. It does not build up over weeks. And it has nothing to do with what a teacher said.
This is not anxiety about climate change. This is the physiological and psychological reality of a warming world, showing up in our hospitals right now.
For many young Australians, the climate is not an abstract future threat projected by anxious teachers. It is their lived experience: the smoke that cancelled their sport, the flood that damaged their neighbour’s house, the summer that broke records they can remember breaking before.
Children expressing distress about the changes they experience are not irrational. Their fear has a basis in reality. The question is not whether to acknowledge that reality, but how.
Here is what research tells us: learning about climate change can reduce distress when it’s done well. When children understand why something is happening and can share concerns with trusted adults, they are less frightened of it, not more.
We do not protect children from anxiety about illness by refusing to teach them biology. We do not protect children who are scared of storms by refusing to explain their causes. We give them an age-appropriate, honest framework and the tools to cope.
The child who cannot understand what is happening around them, who absorbs the anxiety of adults without any context for it, who notices the world changing but has no language for why, is far more vulnerable than one who has been given, carefully and appropriately, a safe space to share concerns, healthy coping strategies and the tools of understanding.
The research is clear: when young people feel equipped, informed and connected with supportive people and the natural world, their wellbeing improves. When they feel kept in the dark while the world changes around them, it doesn’t.
Australia’s education system is one of the most important pathways for young Australians to navigate the world they will actually inhabit, not the one we wish they were inheriting. That obligation should be guided by the best available science and the best available evidence about child development and psychological safety. It should remain free from any influence that serves interests other than theirs.
Our children are already living in a changed climate. They know it in their bodies, in their sleep, in the questions they bring home from school and from life. They deserve an education that meets them honestly in that reality, and helps them find their footing in it.