Support networks aim to help kids through the polycrisis

Key Highlights

• In fact, more than 60% reported problems --difficulty regulating emotion, symptoms of depression, and lower overall mental and physical well-being--that they attributed to the cumulative stress of world affairs.
• Around 60% reported being very or extremely worried about climate change, with more than 45% saying that eco-anxiety affected their daily ability to function.
• Around the same time, a Gallup poll found that 49% of teens said the possibility of nuclear war influenced how they planned for the future.
• The team included the Good Grief Network in its analysis, noting that while GGN said 90% of participants in its programs felt more empowered and less alone, it didn’t publish any data or methods backing up that finding.
• In the early 1980s, during the latter years of the Cold War, around 35% of high school seniors agreed with the statement “Nuclear or biological annihilation will probably be the fate of all mankind within my lifetime,” according to a survey of 130 schools in 48 states.

Sometime in the late 2000s, Pim Sullivan-Tailyour was sitting in the back of a car, headed toward her great-grandmother’s tiny town in the south of Thailand.

She watched big mountains pass by out the window.

She was just six years old but was about to be hit by an adult-size realization.

“They were just quarried out,” she says.

“Like half the mountain just dug out and disappeared, and so there was just this huge orange face.

” Although she probably didn’t know the word “quarry” back then, she sensed that what she was seeing was unnatural.

She also knew, from family stories, that her mother had bathed in a nearby river when she was young, its water so glass-clear she could see fish swimming by.

But the extraction had muddied the water.

“We’re changing things,” Sullivan-Tailyour thought.

“And it doesn’t seem right.

” It was the first time it occurred to her that humans could alter the world--and that they were.

For the worse.

She carried that knowledge with her as she got older and her family moved to the UK.

There, she joined teenagers from other schools in the Schools Sustainability Network, an umbrella organization for groups that work on environmental initiatives.

But even with those connections, Sullivan-Tailyour didn’t encounter anyone at her own school who was interested in environmental activism.

She felt lonely in her desire to push for change--and burnt out on working solo.

“I was pretty much the only person who wanted to do these things,” she says.

That was when she heard about another initiative, called Force of Nature.

A UK-based organization, in 2021 it had spun up Becoming a Force of Nature, a kind of informal online group therapy program, for kids and young adults worried about climate.

The sessions aimed to help young people like Sullivan-Tailyour take their worries and turn them into action, stemming the exact kind of anxiety and burnout she was feeling.

She signed up and soon logged into Zoom for her first session.

Dozens of faces from dozens of countries looked back at her.

“I realized that I wasn’t alone,” she says.

She began to suspect that kids at her school actually did feel the way she did, even if they weren’t doing anything about it.

Sullivan-Tailyour was right, it turns out: Global surveys have found that most kids are anxious about the state of the world--and not just about whether sea levels and carbon counts will continue to rise. They are growing up in a time of what some historians, policymakers, and economists are calling a “polycrisis”: The planet is warming, yes, but also a pandemic happened and could happen again, conflicts keep erupting, nuclear weapons lurk menacingly in silos, housing is growing impossibly expensive, groceries and gas can feel like luxury purchases, health-care costs are skyrocketing, authoritarianism is on the rise, partisanship splits populations, jobs are hard to get and there’s rampant worry AI will take more and more of them, and pings about all those things (and more!) arrive 24-7 in polarizing digital echo chambers.