Climate Change Anxiety as a Mental Toll for Parents: Investigating the Relationship Between Climate Change Anxiety and Parenting Practices

Emerging studies have suggested that the experience of anxiety associated with climate change can take a toll on people’s mental health. While researchers and mental health professionals have emphasized the roles of parents in helping children and adolescents cope with climate change anxiety, they have yet to consider how parents’ experience of climate change anxiety may hamper their parenting roles. This gap warrants research attention, as the experience of mental tolls possibly reduces parents’ psychological capacities for attending to the needs and well-being of their children. The present research fills this gap by examining the relationships between climate change anxiety and maladaptive parenting practices (i.e., low autonomy support, high psychological control, and high inconsistent parenting) among a sample of US parents, with a three-wave longitudinal design (N at Time 1 = 684). Our results from the partial least square-structural equation modeling showed that maladaptive parenting practices were associated with concurrent climate change anxiety and prior parenting practices. These results suggest the possibility that climate change anxiety, as a mental toll, has an immediate and contemporaneous impact on maladaptive parenting practices, which contribute to the accumulation of such practices over time. Overall, our findings provide preliminary support to the notion that climate change anxiety can bear negative consequences to parenting practices, which may undermine their role in assisting their children to cope with climate change anxiety.