Future Kind

By Radiate Publishing

How do we raise a generation who will effect positive change in our world?

And how do we effectively equip them to handle these changes, including the potential chaos they may encounter during this period of global transition?

In Future Kind, a unique mix of academics, social commentators, educators, psychol

• Language: English
• Publisher: Radiate Publishing
• Release date: Jul 16, 2020
• ISBN: 9780648705529

Book preview

Contents

Contents

Preface

Contributors

1 : How to parent while saving the world from climate catastrophe

2 : Facing the realities of climate change

3 : Developing climate consciousness: 7 Ways in 7 Days

4 : Connecting with nature

5 : Connection — the power of ‘us’

6 : Trust: the currency of childhood

7 : The future of intelligence

8 : Sacred activism and being an ally

9 : A colourful upbringing

10 : Indigenous perspectives

11 : Feelings can be wrong

12 : Safe enough to innovate

13 : Leadership in children

14 : Responsibility parenting

Preface

Elisabeth Johnson

Not long after becoming a parent five years ago I found myself asking how I could ensure my daughter grew to be a confident and compassionate adult. A focus on concepts such as mindfulness, and emotional intelligence-based so-called ‘soft skills’ for children were becoming increasingly mainstream, but in subsequent years, as the global political, economic and environmental situations began to feel increasingly dire, a deeper exploration was needed.

Profound cultural change is needed, yet how do we raise a generation who will effect this significant positive change in our world? And how do we effectively equip them to handle these changes, including the potential chaos they may encounter during this period of global transition?

With these questions in mind, I set out to compile a collection of ideas and advice from an interesting variety of academics, social commentators, parenting mentors, and of course, established authors, offering their own area of expertise and insight.

My aim has been to provide a holistic collection aligned with the three dimensions of engagement in the process of cultural transformation described by eco-philosopher and scholar Joanne Macy: 1) actions to slow the damage to Earth and its beings; 2) analysis of structural causes and creation of structural alternatives; and 3) a fundamental shift in worldview and values. (Macy and Young Brown, 1998)

There are so many aspects to these emerging cultural shifts. The list of topics relating them to raising children seems endless and I could easily have continued to pursue contributors ad infinitum. Gender and sexuality, refugee-ism, Indigenous reconciliation, effects of late stage capitalism; these are also important topics. My hope is that this anthology nevertheless covers the crux of many underlying (and more explicit) issues plaguing our society, and themes found within the chapters can apply to a range of circumstances.

In order to achieve better ways of living as a society, our children need to be well equipped with the mental, social, and emotional skills to navigate the breakdown of the current systems, and the fall out effects for themselves and fellow individuals and communities. As we hint in the anthology title ‘Future Kind,’ empathy, loving kindness, and respect (along with an understanding of intersectionality and egalitarianism) will be key to successfully improving our existence on this planet, for all living things. Kindness is an antidote to fear, it underpins the building of community, and it promotes a deeper understanding of our interconnectedness.

Finding the balance between raising kind humans and steeling them against the harshness of our world is an unending challenge. And the current (or perhaps, continuing) state of play leaves many of us experiencing anger, grief, and anxiety. Indeed, one author pulled out of the anthology when she found herself too overwhelmed by the topic; and there were times when, after reading many climate science reports and articles, I myself wondered if the book ought to be called ‘Future, What Future?’

So, what I also want to impart through this collection is hope, for what Charles Eisenstein calls the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible (2013). We need to ground ourselves in an acknowledgement and understanding that our separation is an illusion — whether accepting it for ourselves as inter-beings connected to all other living things (in other words, we are nature), or the ways in which all these topics are deeply interrelated and intractable; no one issue sits in isolation from the other. Embracing this allows us to accept that every act counts, [and] every thought and emotion counts too (Chödrön, 2005). As parents this means that even the small everyday moments with our children offer huge potential to effect positive change, not just in how we guide our children, but through our own self awareness, growth, and healing.

Although you will find much overlap and intertwinement amongst the chapters, I’m sure it goes without saying that each of the author’s views are their own, and not reflective of the other contributing authors (or me) by default. However, I would like to acknowledge the work of the following writers and activists (in addition to all the Future Kind contributing authors of course) for expanding my understanding and views in the areas of anti-racism, subconscious bias, alternative economics, new paradigm thinking, and sacred activism, and who subsequently shaped the direction of this book: Sharyn Holmes, Layla F Saad, Polly Higgins, Charles Eisenstein, and George Monbiot.

On that note, I also wish to thank my father (and Radiate Publishing co-founder) for his extraordinary mentorship, my husband for his continued support, and my two amazing daughters — ultimately all that I do is for you two, and your future.

References

Macy, J & Young Brown, M 1998, Coming Back to Life: Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World, New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, British Columbia, Canada.

Chödrön, P 2005, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times, Shambhala Publications, Boston.

Eisenstein, C 2013, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible, North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, California.

Contributors

Ricci-Jane Adams is the principal of the Institute for Intuitive Intelligence and the author of bestselling Spiritually Fierce, the formula for an activated intuition. She has a PhD from the University of Melbourne, and has spent more than 25 years devoted to her spiritual awakening. She is also a qualified Transpersonal Counsellor.

Larissa Behrendt is a Eualeyai/Kamillaroi woman. She is the Professor of Law and Director of Research at the Jumbunna Indigenous House of Learning at the University of Technology, Sydney. Prof. Behrendt is admitted to the Supreme Court of the ACT and NSW as a barrister and is a member of a number of boards. She is the author of several books on Indigenous legal issues and was named as 2009 NAIDOC Person of the Year.

Melinda Bito is the founder of Eco Explorers and Australia’s first eco toy store and has been a huge advocate of sustainability, child-led play and learning for more than 12 years. Before becoming a parent she worked in Africa with orphaned chimpanzees and as an advocate for endangered wildlife.

Susie Burke is a psychologist, writer, climate change campaigner and parent, currently working in private practice in Castlemaine, Victoria, and raising bike riders, school strikers and fruit trees. She has a PhD in psychology and is a Fellow of the Australian Psychological Society. Susie is author of the Climate Change Empowerment Handbook and other articles and resources on the psychology of climate change.

Marilou Coombe is a coach, mentor, author, yoga teacher, and workshop and retreat facilitator. Born in Lebanon, Marilou moved to Australia aged 10-years without speaking English, which had a lasting impact on building her resilience and creating the life that she now lives. Being the mother of two ‘divine’ energetic young boys has been her big defining moment of change in taking action to have a more fulfilling life, and she is passionate about helping families achieve the same. Marilou has a bachelor’s degree in social science, a Certificate IV in training, and coaching training including NLP, and enjoys working on mindset and gaining clarity about all aspects concerning mind, body and soul. 

Heidi Edmonds is the mother of two young girls and lives in Brisbane, Queensland. She has a PhD in environmental science and is a freelance researcher and writer focused on climate resilience and solutions.. She is also co-founder of Australian Parents for Climate Action.

Rachel Forgasz is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Education at Monash University in Melbourne where she teaches and writes about the influence of emotion, agency, and embodiment on teaching and learning. Her current research explores how to prepare teachers to work with young people in the context of global climate crisis.

Robin Grille is a psychologist, parenting educator and international speaker. He is the author of Parenting for a Peaceful World, Heart to Heart Parenting, and the forthcoming Inner Child Journeys. Robin’s work is animated by his belief that humanity’s future is dependent on how we collectively relate to our children.

Elisabeth Johnson is raising two young daughters with her husband in coastal Victoria. Her career has included trade and academic publishing, freelance design work, and e-commerce endeavours. She currently enjoys focussing her energy on a number of writing, design and community projects related to mental health, climate justice, and holistic parenting.

Naomi Kissiedu is married to an Australian, and has three beautiful multi-racial children. Naomi wrote a series of children’s books — The Colourful Life series — and their success led to a number of focus pieces on SBS World News and Al Jazerra’s The Stream and a TEDx talk: Are you the nanny?

Brigitte Kupfer has been engaged in cultural and social change projects since her teenage years in Germany. She has been a psychologist and psycho-therapist and now co-creates intergenerational learning and healing spaces. As an advocate for de-schooling and peer mentoring networks she supports parents in their role as evolutionary transition leaders.

Anna Lidstone is a Creativity and Innovation Consultant, working with organisations to facilitate ‘21st Century Thinking.’ She received her PhD from the University of Toronto and is certified in a wide range of innovation methodologies. She is also a professional writer. Anna is Australian/English/Canadian, and currently lives in Brisbane.

Andrew Lines is a teacher and educational consultant whose programs and resources (The Rite Journey, The Rite Journey Parenting Plan, Habits of Heart, Man Made and Woman Wise) serve teachers, parents and communities by empowering them to self sufficiently and sustainably grow responsible, resilient, respectful and resourceful children and adolescents.

Phoebe Mwanza is Zambian-born and Zimbabwean-raised who is an Australian Diversity, Inclusion & Equity Consultant. She works as a lawyer, specifically in the area of human rights and anti-discrimination law. She is also the host of The Griot Podcast and a writer and speaker on social justice issues.

Ann Sanson’s academic research has mainly focused on understanding the role of child, family and community characteristics for healthy child and adolescent development. Her current focus is on the impacts of the climate crisis on children and youth and how to best support parents and young people in dealing with it.

Nelly Thomas was a popular stand-up comedian for 16 years but has now traded the stage for the quiet life as an author and media personality. She was listed as one of Australia’s most innovative thinkers in The Age newspaper and was featured on the ABC television’s Big Ideas: The Smartest Stuff.

1 : How to parent while saving the world from climate catastrophe

Heidi Edmonds

Today, as she has several other times, Lucinda, who is five-years-old, mentioned that she did not think Winter would ever come again. It was too hot. A pretty mid-Autumn had comfortably placed itself where Winter used to be, and I felt so deeply compelled to stop, look around, and admire the beauty of this moment. Because it was deeply, simply, complexly, and wonderfully beautiful. With a cool garden my girls can play in in the afternoon. With a sky full of patchy colours from the storm clouds that are seemingly a new, permanent fixture this Winter.

I remember when Lucinda was born, reading Steve Biddulph’s Raising Girls (2013) in my armchair as I breastfed her late at night. I had very little time for social media or for talking with friends except when they visited. And now her May birth was amidst cold, crisp days. Just five years ago. I’ve managed to find more time to do things other than just parent, but this mild, barely-existent Winter has me spellbound and a little bit scared.

Last summer, when the air conditioning failed in January, we were blessed with coolish weather while the rest of Australia recovered from a 40°C+ heatwave. A week without air conditioning was frustrating, but I was so thankful that our own hot weather here in Brisbane (or Meanjin, our city’s indigenous name) book-ended the cool weather when the air conditioner was on the blink. Otherwise, in our old Queenslander, with a thin and relatively un-insulated roof, it would have been baking, devastatingly hot and we would have had to stay with my mum for the week until it was fixed. Because, in the summer, air conditioning repairers are so in demand you have to book a week in advance, I plan to invest in two air conditioning units when finances allow. The portable air conditioner we bought in the interim while we waited for the new installation only shaved off a degree or two.

Love for my children was the force that called me to act on the climate crisis

I awoke to the climate emergency the year that my Stella, who is now three-years-old, was born. Up until that time, I, an environmental scientist, had a general understanding that climate change was a concern, a big concern, a very hard to solve concern, one that our governments would surely tackle; it seemed far off and unlikely to affect me. I was so busy, with starting and then finishing my environmental science PhD, with working, with coping with broken relationships, with making new friends, with making music about broken relationships, with falling in love with my husband, with learning how to raise a baby and then a child, and then a family, that when my engineering mentor David, suggested I wrap up my PhD (which seemed never-ending at the time) and focus my energies on protecting the climate I just brushed this request off until later, until I was ready, until I was finished.

The year Stella was born, David sent me an invitation to sign a petition, asking Australia to declare a climate emergency. A man I knew called Steve Posselt was riding and lugging a kayak along dried out rivers to Canberra where the petition would be delivered. It aimed for 100,000 signatures to have a good chance of being debated in federal parliament. I think it reached around 18,000 signatures. But I signed it. And I read this strange and cumbersome language that said that we needed to mobilise on climate like we were in a world war. It said that the impacts of climate change were urgent and could affect this generation of kids. I dismissed it to a point. It seemed a bit extreme.

But then as I pushed my little girls in their double-sized pram around the streets of my slice of Brisbane, the sun, renowned for its heat, beat on my back and it felt hotter than I had ever remembered. Hotter and more persistent than the heat waves of Leumeah in Sydney’s south west when as a child in the 1980s, my grandma would run a cold bath to cool me down.

And so I started to read. I read a few scientific articles, but mostly I read news articles about the state of the climate, the urgency of taking action, what 1°C to 4°C warming might look like. How 4°C could mean the end of human civilisation. What this warming might mean for my little girls. I read about how the last ice age was only 4°C cooler than pre-industrial times, and 4°C warming could lead to human civilisation fraying. Even about 2°C warming is going to mess with the food my kids will be able to eat, and about how quickly we need to roll out renewables and find more sustainable ways of living. About how important it is to talk out about climate change, because not enough people are talking about it.

I shared what I learnt to Facebook and then later in blog articles. I discovered Twitter was a great platform for seeking out expert advice and discovering new perspectives. I joined Citizens Climate Lobby and met my federal member of parliament and others. I helped set up a climate advocacy group for parents called Australian Parents for Climate Action. I learned how to speak about climate with adults and children (in age appropriate ways, in line with the guidelines from the Australian Psychological Society) and I developed my own solutions-focused advocacy style. In the midst of this, first Zero Hour in the USA and then Greta Thunberg in Sweden, inspired movements led by high school students that showed the world how to talk, simply, and fearlessly, about the threat of the climate crisis.

Australian school strikers inspired by Greta Thunberg eloquently showed the world that awareness of climate change as a threat to our children’s future health and happiness is widespread. Extinction Rebellion and the broader Climate Emergency Declaration movement also moved the climate conversation forward. I used my training in my environmental science PhD to interpret the science of climate and reach out to climate scientists to piece together simple ways to talk about it with friends and family and my community. My husband and I watched David Attenborough’s Climate Change: The Facts (2019) together and I felt more able just to be me, to share my fears and hopes more easily with him.

I wrangled parenting, struggled with the usual parenting challenges such as when to get kids to bed, and how long to let them play in the garden, to avoid afternoon and evening tantrums and meltdowns. I wrangled the climate crisis, contemplating ideas for solving it and ways to protect and feed my community in years to come, finding more ways to