@Gnomeshatecheese @Cousin_Isobel It's complicated.

I grew up in a Christian environment where people were extremely fixated on the apocalypse. Teachers frequently told my class that we probably wouldn't live to see adulthood because we were living in the end times. It fucked us up. Scaring kids with global warming shit will fuck them up in the same way. It is actively fucking them up. Kids feel like they have no future. The problem is if their parents watch the news or something, the kids will hear about these things anyway. Kids listen to these things.

Even if we accept that climate change is 100% real and 100% caused by human activity, what the fuck is an 8 year old gonna do about it? Most adults can't even do shit about it. The amount of people who actually have the power to do shit about it is mad small.

This begs the question, would it be better to introduce this concept to kids in a gentler tone through a children's book? I don't know. I haven't read these books, so I don't know if they're activist like "The Lorax" or activist like a pamphlet from The Extinction Rebellion.

I have no idea about the effects of like... Teaching 5 year olds about the abuse of migrants or whatever. Kids' TV shows have handled very serious subjects well (such as the Sesame Street episode where Big Bird learns about death, and the Mr. Rogers episode about war that iirc only aired once because it was declared too anti-war by the US lol, the Arthur episode about 9/11).

It's also important to note that sometimes seemingly random shit will launch kids (and sometimes adults) into anxiety mode so there's some unpredictability here. When I was like 10 I learned that the sun was gonna freak out and absorb Mercury and Venus and probably melt most of Earth in about 5 billion years and spent like a full year fretting like it could happen any day. I've always been a neurotic dipshit though.