Climate Anxiety Is Altering Family Planning

Summary

Podcast Summary: Short Wave – “Climate Anxiety Is Altering Family Planning”

Date: December 30, 2025
Host: Emily Kwong
Producers/Co-hosts: Hannah Chin
Guests: Alessandra Rahm, Dr. Kimberly Nicholas, Dr. Jade Sasser, Elizabeth Bayard

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Episode Overview

This episode of NPR’s Short Wave explores how anxiety about climate change is affecting decisions around family planning, particularly among younger generations. Through personal stories and expert interviews, the hosts examine the science, history, and psychology surrounding climate-related reproductive anxiety and highlight collective and individual actions that can empower listeners facing these concerns.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Personal Perspective: Climate Journalism Meets Parenthood

• Alessandra Rahm, former Al Jazeera journalist, shares how her encounters with climate crises (from wildfires in California to floods in Puerto Rico) have become more personal over time.
  • Notable quote:

    “I used to travel around the world with Al Jazeera as a documentary producer ... so many stories are climate stories.” (00:40–00:51)

  • After recently having a child, Alessandra describes a heightened sense of living “moment by moment” as a new parent, underscored by existential worries about the future her daughter will face (01:34–01:43).

2. The Rise of Climate Anxiety in Family Planning

• Host Emily Kwong and producer Hannah Chin introduce the “kids question” – how climate change shapes decisions to have and raise children (02:30–02:44).
• Citing Pew research, Hannah notes that over a quarter of people under 50 who do not plan to have children cite climate change as a major reason (04:50–05:00).
  • Notable quote:

    “The majority of Gen Zers report that they’re worried or anxious about climate change, period.” – Hannah Chin (04:50)

3. The Science: What’s the True Impact of Having Kids?

• Origin of widespread beliefs linking family size and climate: a 2017 paper titled The Climate Mitigation Gap (05:11).
  • High-impact actions: going car-free, flying less, eating plant-based diet, and “have one less child.”
• Dr. Kimberly Nicholas (Lund University):

  “One roundtrip flight emits 1.6 tons and that’s equivalent to two years of eating meat ... You’d have to be a vegetarian for 25 years to equal out the flying of one year.” (05:55–06:14)

  • The calculation that “having a child” results in 58.6 metric tons of CO2/year in industrialized countries has garnered public debate (06:37).

4. Debunking the “Population Problem”

• Dr. Jade Sasser (UC Riverside) highlights how anxiety over population growth dates back to Thomas Malthus in the 1800s, whose arguments had classist, dismissive connotations (07:30–08:00).
  • Notable quote:

    “The consensus among environmentalists for a long time has been that population growth is bad for the environment ... and it has been proven wrong by scientists over and over again.” – Jade Sasser (07:07)

• The science is clear: energy use, not population per se, is the main driver of global climate change (08:26–08:38).

  "Science tells us the issue is how we live, not that we live." – Emily Kwong (08:38)

5. Reproductive Autonomy and Climate Emotions

• Kimberly Nicholas reframes her advice: having a child should not be “traded off” against other climate actions (08:42).
• Climate anxiety is a real, growing field of research—defined as “psychological distress individuals experience due to climate change” (09:41).
  • Jade Sasser:

    “It’s ... quite normal to feel deeply anxious about these changes in our environment.” (09:25)

6. What’s Actually Lowering Birth Rates?

• Birth rates are down in the US; researchers warn not to “blame” climate anxiety alone. Economic insecurity, job/housing concerns, and weak safety nets are also key factors (10:27–10:45).

7. Expert Guidance for Anxious Would-be Parents

• Kimberly Nicholas’ message:

  “If you feel like your time on Earth is going to be missing something essential and have a big hole in your heart if you don’t have a child, then I think you should absolutely go for it. ... That gives you more energy and incentive to fight for ... a better future.” (10:52–11:21)

• She points out that those earning above $42,000/year are in the global top 10% and thus have outsized agency and responsibility (11:21–11:40).

8. Collective Action over Individual Guilt

• Nicholas’s High Impact Climate Action Guide encourages collective actions – e.g., lobbying institutions and shifting bank investments (12:01–12:19).
• Jade Sasser:

  “When we take these on as personal problems ... that we suffer with in silence, it actually lets ... our leaders off the hook, and they should be on the hook.” (12:19–12:42)

9. What Hope Looks Like in Parenthood

• Elizabeth Bayard (Mom’s Clean Air Force): After Hurricane Florence and dire IPCC warnings, she became an activist, reminding parents:

  “You need community. We all need community. None of us were meant to carry this alone.” (13:34)

• Being open about fears allows children to witness collective action and hope:

  “They see her pain and they see her taking action on it ... there are a lot of adults—including their mom—who are not giving up and fighting every day for their future.” (14:14)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the origins of climate-family anxiety:
  “Who or what told us that having kids was a major contributor to climate change?” – Hannah Chin (04:54)
• Reflections on the complexity of action:
  “The math doesn’t pencil out. If you say, okay, well, I’m someone who doesn’t want to have a child, that means I get 50 flights a year.” – Kimberly Nicholas (08:42)
• On the power of hope and action:
  “Caring for a child can also be a hopeful thing to do. It can connect us to each other. It can help us act. Because the future isn’t set in stone.” – Hannah Chin (14:23)
• On community as a starting point:
  “If all you can do is sign onto the email list of a parent climate group, that is a place to start.” – Elizabeth Bayard (13:34)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Personal Story & Introduction: 00:40–02:16
• The “Kids Question”: 02:30–05:00
• The 2017 Study & Its Impact: 05:11–06:55
• Population & Environmental Narratives: 07:07–08:00
• Climate Anxiety & Mental Health: 09:25–10:01
• Birth Rate Trends & Drivers: 10:27–10:45
• Guidance from Experts: 10:52–11:21
• Collective Action Focus: 12:01–12:42
• Activism, Hope, and Community: 12:47–14:23

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Takeaways

• Decisions about whether (and how) to raise children in a warming world are complex and deeply personal, but should be informed by science, history, and collective action—not guilt or outdated narratives of population control.
• Climate anxiety is a real and valid psychological response, and community is essential for both coping and change.
• Individuals have agency, especially in wealthier countries, but real progress requires systemic action and holding leaders accountable.
• Hope can be found in action, solidarity, and open communication with the next generation.

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Relevant Resources:

• The Climate Mitigation Gap (Environmental Research Letters, 2017)
• High Impact Climate Action Guide (Kimberly Nicholas et al.)
• Books: Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question (Jade Sasser), Parenting in a Changing Climate (Elizabeth Bayard)

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End of Content Summary
(Intro, Outro, and Sponsor segments omitted as requested.)

Transcript

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[Emily Kwong]

You're listening to Short Wave from.

[Sponsor/Announcer]

Hey everyone.

[Hannah Chin]

Emily Kwong here.

[Emily Kwong]

And welcome back to Nature Quest, our monthly segment that brings you a question from a fellow shortwaver who's paying attention to the environment and how our choices shape the world.

[Alessandra Rahm]

I used to travel around the world with Al Jazeera as a documentary producer.

[Emily Kwong]

Alessandra Rahm is a journalist.

[Alessandra Rahm]

And a lot of those stories, even if they didn't start out focusing on climate, there were clients climate narratives there because so many stories are climate stories.

[Emily Kwong]

The stories Alessandra covered at the time were unfolding in other countries, in Thailand and in Canada. But over time, she watched these climate narratives get closer to where she's from, Puerto Rico, Flint, Michigan, and eventually to her home state of California.

[Alessandra Rahm]

A house I was living in we had to evacuate because of a wildfire threat. But now that's kind of a threat that everyone around here lives with.

[Emily Kwong]

And more recently, Alessandra has had other reasons to be thinking about the future. Because a couple weeks ago she and her partner had a kid.

[Alessandra Rahm]

It's 8am we woke up how many times last night?

[Emily Kwong]

Three.

[Sponsor/Announcer]

Three.

[Alessandra Rahm]

You know, everything has changed in the last two weeks. For me, I can only think in like two and a half to three hour increments for when I'm feeding her or when I'm trying to get sleep, which is not often. So life becomes very moment by moment.

[Jade Sasser]

Zara, wake up.

[Emily Kwong]

Alessandra has always wanted to be a parent. But as a climate journalist, she worries about the future her daughter will have on a warming planet. And we know a lot of you short wavers carry this worry too.

[Alessandra Rahm]

I mean, the world doesn't feel like it's in a great place, I'll admit, in addition to the climate crisis. So you're just aware that you might have more work to do to set your kid up to be in a place where they can thrive.

[Emily Kwong]

So today's quest, kids having and raising a kid can feel like such a fraught decision these days. So what do experts have to say about it? And for people who do have and care for kids, how do you raise them in a way that's good for them and for the planet? You're listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from npr.

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[Emily Kwong]

For this Nature quest is producer Hannah chin, my fellow NatureQuest co creator hey Emily.

[Hannah Chin]

And today we're going to talk about what some people consider the third rail of climate change the kids question. And to be clear, this decision is not just limited to parents. True, it can include aunties and uncles and grandparents and other caregivers. So if you're thinking about making a kid a part of your community, this is for you.

[Emily Kwong]

It's something that a lot of folks, but especially younger folks are thinking about. Right, Hannah?

[Hannah Chin]

Yeah, I mean, the majority of gen zers report that they're worried or anxious about climate change, period. And more broadly, a Pew Research survey last year found that of folks under 50 who don't plan to have kids, more than a quarter of them say concerns about the and climate change are a major factor in that. And I really wanted to figure out where is this concern coming from? Like who or what told us that having kids was a major contributor to climate change? So I started reporting on this back when I was working on the Gimlet podcast How to Save a Planet. And I found a bunch of recent articles, like in the past five or so years that all cited the exact same paper. It was published in 2017 in the Academic journal Environmental Research Letters. It's called the Climate Mitigation Gap.

[Emily Kwong]

I have read this paper and the actions the climate Actions are pretty clear. They're things like go car free, eat a plant based diet and reduce flying as much as possible. So if you are a high emitter, about half of your carbon footprint comes from transportation.

[Kimberly Nicholas]

One round trip flight emits 1.6 tons and that's equivalent to two years of eating meat. So for a high flyer, someone who frequently flies, by far the biggest action you can do is reduce your flying. You'd have to be a vegetarian for 25 years to equal out the flying of one year. So it really adds up.

[Hannah Chin]

This is Kimberly Nicholas. She was a co author of this paper. She's a professor of sustainability science at Lund University in Sweden. And she told me that when she and her colleagues published this paper, the press coverage really focused on the fourth individual action, have one less child.

[Kimberly Nicholas]

That's because in the long run, having a kid produces a lot of emissions.

[Hannah Chin]

Specifically an average of 58.6 metric tons of CO2 a year. If you're in an industrialized country, that's an equivalent of 7.9 homes energy use for one year. And this kicked up a lot of debate because people already have very strong feelings about children and reproductive choice.

[Emily Kwong]

Yes. And while this paper was focused on the individual decision of whether or not to have a child, I think that part of the public's reaction to this work had to do with these long standing debates about population and the environment.

[Jade Sasser]

The consensus among environmentalists for a long time has been that population growth is bad for the environment because it means that more human beings on the planet will consume more resources and there will be less available for all of us and that we will all suffer as a result. And it has been proven wrong by scientists over and over again.

[Emily Kwong]

This is Jade Sasser, an associate professor of gender and sexuality studies and society, environment and health equity at UC Riverside. And she traced this idea all the way back to the 1800s and a British economist named Thomas Robert Malthus, who was writing against British laws that offered food aid to the poor.

[Jade Sasser]

He said the poor had too many children and if the government supported them with food, they would never stop having too many children. So his argument was to let them starve and die out.

[Emily Kwong]

To be clear, this is not the argument that Kimberly and her colleague were making. But it is important to think about how this broader dialogue about population and the environment has a checkered past. And in reality, population growth, particularly when it comes to consumption, definitely has local impacts on local resources. But science tells us that is not what is driving global climate change. Right.

[Hannah Chin]

What is driving global climate Change is fossil fuel use. Human development overall is definitely part of that, but it has more to do with energy companies and governments and how we set up our infrastructure.

[Emily Kwong]

Science tells us the issue is how we live, not that we live.

[Kimberly Nicholas]

The math doesn't pencil out. If you say, okay, well, I'm someone who doesn't want to have a child, that means I get 50 flights a year.

[Emily Kwong]

So Kimberly Nicholas, the scientist in Sweden, talks really differently about the kid question now. Now she focuses on the actions we should take to eliminate emissions today.

[Hannah Chin]

Yeah, as someone who does want to co parent a kid someday, that's the journey I'm interested in. Like, I think reproductive autonomy is really important and I'm still worried about the climate impacts of my individual actions, including things like flying and driving and maybe having a kid.

[Emily Kwong]

Yeah, and Jade understands that too. She is really sympathetic to the emotions that climate change elicits.

[Jade Sasser]

It is in fact, according to environmental psychologists, quite normal to feel deeply anxious about these changes in our environment. There's nothing wrong with the feeling of climate anxiety or being reproductively anxious in response.

[Emily Kwong]

This is a whole field of research now, climate anxiety, sometimes called climate distress. It's defined as the psychological distress that individuals experience due to climate change and its impacts. And this growing body of research is showing that, yes, climate change is harming people's mental health and affecting their life choices. These are not flimsy feelings.

[Hannah Chin]

I think it helps to hear that because I don't even know what my future is going to look like. Right. So how could I bring another new human being into that?

[Emily Kwong]

Absolutely. It's a concern, especially among our generation, among Gen Z and younger millennials. Jade took this topic so seriously. She wrote an entire book about it called Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question. And she told me that we don't know yet if people's climate, reproductive concerns or hesitancy is driving large scale demographic changes.

[Hannah Chin]

Right. We do know that birth rates in the US are down, but it kind of seems like that's due to a variety of factors. Right. The cost of living crisis, job and housing, insecurity, a lack of social safety nets, et cetera, et cetera. So we can't attribute it solely to cl. Maybe we'll know in 10 years. Once more Gen Z and young millennials.

[Emily Kwong]

Have kids or don't have kids. So if you're struggling with this decision, here's what Kimberly has to say.

[Kimberly Nicholas]

For people who don't want a child, who don't see themselves as a parent, I think that's a really valid choice. And Something that needs to be accepted and supported. But if you feel like your time on Earth is going to be missing something essential and have a big hole in your heart, if you don't have a child, then I think you should absolutely go for it. And that gives you more energy and incentive to fight for and work for a better future and do these high impact climate actions that will help us get there.

[Hannah Chin]

In fact, Kimberly says the people best positioned to do those high impact climate actions aren't just politicians and energy CEOs. They're also anyone who makes a little over US$42,000 a year. Those people are part of the top 10% richest people on Earth and we have a lot of power in this situation.

[Kimberly Nicholas]

If you are lucky enough to live in a democracy, then you have citizen actions available to you, which most of the world does not.

[Emily Kwong]

To figure out what actions you can take, Kimberly has created a high impact climate action guide based on a study that she and researcher Christian Nielsen published in the journal Nature in 2021. It's kind of a choose your own adventure that you can fill out online.

[Hannah Chin]

Yeah, we'll link to this guide in the episode notes. And when I was working through this guide, I was struck by how many of these actions were things that we do collectively, like encouraging your loved ones to take their money out of banks that use fossil fuels or working with your union to change industry standards. Here's Jade again.

[Jade Sasser]

I think it's really important to reframe that narrative and understand this is a large scale social, political and structural problem. And when we take these on as personal problems or individual problems that we suffer with in silence, it actually lets us, our leaders, off the hook and they should be on the hook.

[Hannah Chin]

So researchers say, if you're hearing all this and you're upset, join the fight.

[Elizabeth Bayard]

I think the first thing that I would want to say to parents is just, I see how hard you are working.

[Hannah Chin]

Elizabeth Bayard got involved back in 2018. That was the year Hurricane Florence devastated coastal North Carolina, where she grew up. And the IPCC came out with a report saying we have 12 years left to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees degrees Celsius and limit climate catastrophe.

[Elizabeth Bayard]

And you know, I remember thinking, my kids, they'll be 14 in 12 years. That's not even the full length of their childhood.

[Emily Kwong]

So now Elizabeth works for a group called Mom's Clean Air Force that mobilizes parents and caregivers. She's also written a book called Parenting in a Changing Climate in which she tells parents to find support around this issue.

[Elizabeth Bayard]

You need community. We all need community. None of us were meant to carry this alone. So if you, you know, have a tiny baby and all you can do is sign or the email list of Parent Climate Group, that is a place to start.

[Emily Kwong]

Another place to start is with feelings. Jade recommended this tool called the Climate Emotions Wheel to help kids process how they feel, but more importantly, help parents talk about how they're feeling. Yeah, research shows that one of the barriers for parents even talking about climate change with their kids is their own unprocessed emotions to Elizabeth shares those emotions with her twins. They see her pain and they see her taking action on it.

[Elizabeth Bayard]

They're also aware that there are a lot of adults, including their mom, who are working on it and who are not giving up and who are fighting every day for their future.

[Hannah Chin]

And Emily, that's the last thing that really stuck with me, that caring for a child can also be a hopeful thing to do. It can connect us to each other. It can help us act. Because the future isn't set in stone. And that's true whether we have kids in our lives or not. We've linked all the resources we mentioned in our episode notes along with books written by our guests for whatever role kids and climate might play in your life.

[Emily Kwong]

And just as a reminder, Nature Quest is our new monthly series. It is built around you and on the changes you're noticing in the world around you. So send us a voice memo with your name, where you live and your question and we might make it into a whole episode.

[Hannah Chin]

This episode was produced by Hannah Chin and Rachel Carlson. It was edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez and fact checked by Tyler Jones. Jimmy Keeley was the audio engineer.

[Emily Kwong]

Special thanks to Sam Paulson for writing the NatureQuest theme music. Beth Donovan is our senior director and Colin Campbell is our senior Vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Emily Kwong.

[Hannah Chin]

And I'm Hannah Chinny.

[Emily Kwong]

Thank you for listening to Short Wave from npr.

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