Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg became famous this bound for launching a student movement to compel adults to take action on climate modify. Instead of going to school, Greta has been spending her Fridays in forepart of the Swedish parliament with a sign reading: "School Strike for Climate." Students in more than 70 countries take since followed her lead. But before she started trying to convince the world to take action, Thunberg worked on her parents. She showered them with facts and showed them documentaries. "After a while, they started listening to what I actually said," Thunberg told the Guardian newspaper. "That's when I realized I could make a departure."

Thunberg is not lone. Other immature people tin be equally convincing, according to a paper published May 6 in Nature Climate change. The squad of social scientists and ecologists from North Carolina Land Academy who authored the report found that children tin increase their parents' level of concern about climate change because, unlike adults, their views on the issue do not generally reflect whatsoever entrenched political ideology. Parents also really do intendance what their children retrieve, fifty-fifty on socially charged problems like climatic change or sexual orientation.

Postulating that pupils might be ideal influencers, the researchers decided to test how 10-to-14–year-olds' exposure to climate change coursework might affect, not merely the youngsters' views, just those of their parents. The proposed pass-through issue turned out to be true: teaching a child about the warming climate often raised concerns among parents about the upshot. Fathers and conservative parents showed the biggest change in attitudes, and daughters were more effective than sons in shifting their parents' views. The results suggest that conversations between generations may exist an constructive starting point in combating the effects of a warming environs. "This model of intergenerational learning provides a dual benefit," says graduate student Danielle Lawson, the paper's lead author. "[It prepares] kids for the future since they're going to bargain with the burden of climate change'southward impact. And it empowers them to help make a deviation on the issue now by providing them a structure to have conversations with older generations to bring us together to work on climate change."

Scientists in the field notice the study heartening. "These encouraging results suggest that not only are children increasingly engaged in advocating for their future, they are also effective advocates to their parents," says climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe of Texas Tech University. She was not involved in the research but works to bridge the gap betwixt scientists and stakeholders on the issue. "As a woman myself and someone who ofttimes engages with bourgeois Christian communities," she says, "I love that information technology'due south the daughters who were found to be most constructive at changing their difficult-nosed dads' minds."

The intergenerational model is "a promising avenue for those of usa in climate change education," says Nicole Holthuis, a researcher in scientific discipline education at Stanford University, who was not a researcher on the study. Too often, Holthuis says, scientists and educators believe that delivering the facts of global warming will be enough to change minds. "With this study," she says, "they're addressing a critical need to acknowledge that the sociopolitical aspects of climate change go far very difficult for people to take [the facts] in. Maybe we can leverage these intergenerational relationships in ways that tin be very productive." As a next step, Holthuis would like to meet if increasing levels of concern from this curriculum interpret into actual changes in behavior. Child-focused lessons on a similar upshot did alter parents' actions. A 2022 study of Daughter Sentinel troops plant that an educational program on energy consumption resulted in reduced energy use by their families.

In the North Carolina study, the curriculum consisted of four classroom activities and a field-based service-learning project. Of 238 families in that written report, 92 served as controls; those children'due south teachers did non use the new curriculum. Parents were invited to view outdoor projects and were interviewed by their children. Instead of addressing climatic change directly, children asked adults about local changes they might have noticed. Parents, says Lawson, responded to a serial of questions from their children: "How have you seen the conditions change? Have you e'er seen the sea-level ascension? We wanted to have climate change out of it but to make it more ideologically neutral." At the kickoff and end of the study, parents were surveyed on demographic characteristics such equally historic period and political ideology likewise as their views on climate change.

Concern about the issue was measured on a 17-signal calibration from to the lowest degree concerned (–eight) to most concerned (+viii).  Over two years, levels of concern increased amongst all parents, including those in the command group. Merely those who engaged in the curriculum with their children showed larger increases and parents who identified as male or conservative more doubled their level of business organization about climate change from relatively unconcerned (–2) to relatively concerned (+2).

Lawson believes that conversations almost climatic change were easier because of the level of trust betwixt parents and their children. "That doesn't necessarily exist betwixt ii adults talking to each other," she says. The authors do non know why girls were more effective than boys but suggest that girls may accept been more than concerned to brainstorm with or are better communicators in this age group than boys. While this paper doesn't measure behavioral change, it does provide hope, says Lawson, "that if nosotros can promote this community-building and conversation-building on climate change, we tin can come up together and work together on a solution."