As we all know too well, there are a variety of socio-political reasons that often prevent conservative men from caring about climate change. But what if there were a way to knock down the walls they put up? To cut through the political frame of denial that says conservatives don’t believe in climate change? To kill the rhetorical excuses predicated on a deliberate misunderstanding of the science, like the claim “the climate has always changed”?
New research published Monday in Nature Climate Change suggests a possible solution that initially seems weird, but once you think about it, makes a lot of sense: their daughters. The study found that when girls take a course on climate change in school, conservative fathers “more than doubled their concern levels.”
How? Researchers in North Carolina created a climate change curriculum that educated kids about climate with the intention that those kids pass that knowledge on to their parent--without explicitly assigning them to tell their parents.
With a sample size of 238 families with middle school children in coastal North Carolina, the study is far from the final word. But its findings certainly appear compelling.
The kids who got the special curriculum ended up more concerned about climate change, as did their parents. That parents ended up showing greater concern is huge because the curriculum didn’t directly instruct the kids to bring the knowledge home. Rather, it seems the perennial parental “what’d you learn today?” question was enough for many kids to convince their parents to care about climate change.
Getting more granular, the study found that the greatest response was from those who generally exhibit the greatest degree of skepticism: male conservatives. Among those whose children received the tailored lessons, conservatives’ concern about climate among grew to the point where it was actually greater than moderates’ concern, and was in fact higher than liberal parents whose kids were in the control group. Concern among fathers was less than mothers in the control and pre-lesson scoring, but it actually rose slightly above the concern mothers expressed once their children went through the lessons.
And the biggest effect of all was seen in conservative men with daughters, who are apparently more persuasive than sons.
While the gender dynamic of girls being more persuasive than boys is certainly unexpected and interesting, that kids can convince their parents to care about climate change makes sense intuitively. Polling consistently shows that one of the top reasons people care about climate change is their children.
But more importantly, children are trusted messengers. A parent isn’t going to accuse their kid of being a Marxist agent bent on collapsing capitalism or installing a one-world government, and a parent isn’t able to simply ignore or block a child like they would an opponent on social media.
A parent’s trust is hard to quantify, but remember that from a psychological perspective, denial is an emotional coping mechanism. Throwing rational facts at an emotional response isn’t going to get results: emotions trump facts every time.
But a parent’s connection to their child is as pure and raw an emotion as one can get. And apparently, the father-daughter bond is particularly potent when it comes to dismantling the mental and emotional wall of denial erected brick by “But Al Gore!” brick.
These findings provide yet another reason to justify putting an intersectional emphasis on feminism, women in STEM, and climate change. If a middle-school-level education on climate is enough to make a girl’s denier dad care about climate change, just imagine what a college degree could do!
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