In 2023, I was very happy to be awarded a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at Lancaster University, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and to be held at the Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University. As part of this fellowship, I have the opportunity to start some new pilot research. I had been mulling over the question of children and climate change for a few years, as I started to think about how our ideas about what it means to be ‘human’ have been shifting as the climate crisis intensifies and gathers pace, and how geographers and other critical scholars should respond to this. I landed on the question of how meanings of ‘family’ have come under strain and adapted in the context of several overlapping crises, such as the Covid-19 pandemic and the 2008 financial crisis which has resulted in economic austerity policies in many countries, including the UK. As a woman in my early 30s, these questions have also been at the forefront of my own mind. So here’s what my new research project, Future Families, is about, and why it is important.
The accelerating climate crisis is making younger people experience mounting anxiety about their futures.
The accelerating climate crisis is making younger people experience mounting anxiety about their futures. According to a global survey from 2021, nearly six in ten young people (ages 16-25) were ‘very or extremely’ worried about climate change, while four in ten said they were hesitant to have children as a result of the climate crisis. As can be seen from these figures, this anxiety is leading some younger people to adjust their expectations for lives that will inevitably be lived under increasingly unstable climactic conditions. This anxiety is not restricted to young people: adults who have children fear for what kind of future their children can look forward to when they reach adulthood. These changes in expectations include deeply personal questions about what kind of family life is, or will be, possible or desirable. If a ‘traditional’ family life is no longer possible, then what can or should replace it?
If a ‘traditional’ family life is no longer possible, then what can or should replace it?
We need to take this anxiety and hesitancy seriously. Currently, in much of the political and media conversation about the climate crisis, the emphasis is on how to re-organise and transform our societies in areas such as energy, transport, agriculture and construction rather than, in the words of the geographer Cindi Katz (2018: 725), the “everyday spaces” of the home and family in which these changes will both take place and be felt. In other words, the focus is on production at the expense of reproduction and care. But as feminist thinkers and activists like Silvia Federici and Selma James have long insisted, there can be no production without social reproduction, no waged labour without “reproductive labour”. Therefore, academic research needs to give closer attention to how people adjust their expectations for their intimate, caring lives in response to a climate crisis that seems more present every day. Where these dilemmas are discussed, there is a tendency to present decisions over whether to have children – among the most personal – as simply a consumer choice among others, such as avoiding flights or giving up meat. We need an alternative framing that affirms reproductive justice and that gives space to diverse, situated accounts of how people understand their (non)reproductive choices over an extended time period.
Therefore, academic research needs to give closer attention to how people adjust their expectations for their intimate, caring lives in response to a climate crisis that seems more present every day.
Now, for practicalities. I will look at this more closely using qualitative research methods. This means that rather than achieving a representative sample and trying to generate as much data as possible, I will recruit a small number of participants and invite them to share their understandings and experiences in their own words. I will conduct in-depth, biographical interviews with people who have decided not to have (more) children for reasons related to the climate crisis. To make sure I have a multi-generational sample of participants, I will also interview people who had their children some decades ago, but who wish to reflect back on this from within the context of climate change and other crises. Carrying out these interviews will help me achieve two aims. First, it will help me understand how participants have made up their minds about (in)voluntary childlessness, family size and the climate crisis over a long period of time. Second, it will shed light on whether and how participants are cultivating any kind of alternative family structures or relationships.
Finally: what I am hoping to do with this research? Of course, I want to contribute to academic scholarship, especially in feminist, political and cultural geography. But I also hope that its findings will be of interest to policymakers, non-governmental and cultural organisations which are invested in an inclusive, collective public conversation about how we live under conditions of climate crisis.
This post is also published on my personal website. Thanks for reading! If you’re interested in reading more about the Future Families project, please visit my profile at Lancaster University.
