Unfortunately I couldn't get my son into private kindergarten. He brought me a little book he made about climate change, and he said he was scared that the world is going to end. He is 6.
I sat down with him and told him a bedtime story. I told him that when I was a little girl, my teachers told me that when I grew up, the air outside would be poisonous, the rain would be acid and burn your skin, and that there would be so much trash that the world would be covered in mountains of garbage. They told me that the whales would all be gone, that the world would get too hot and the ice caps would melt and cover all the land in water. I told my son that when I went home from school, I told my daddy, his grandfather, what they said. My daddy, his grandpa, told me that when he was a little boy back a long long time ago, his teachers told him that the world was going to freeze, and all the plants would die and many people would starve. But the world didn't freeze, nor did it heat up so the ice caps melted. There are still whales in the ocean, the rain is just rain, the world isn't covered in trash and the air is cleaner than it was 100 years ago, and there are more trees in our state than back then, too. They have made these predictions for generations and none of them ever come true. I told him not to be afraid, when he's an old man the sun will still shine, the rain will still fall, the grass will still grow and the birds will still sing. He was very relieved and I could see his tension melt away. Talk to your kids. It's the only way to deprogram them before it sticks permanently.
Ahhh thanks for the memories.
I too remember acid rain, holes in the ozone layer and predictions of the Appalachian mountains becoming beach front property. I honestly didnt understand the "science" behind it (maybe because it was lacking). Even in elementary school I intuitively grasped I was being fed bullshit though so I questioned a lot of things.
I too was labeled a disruptive kid. The school cooerced my mother into me getting testing (She didn't agree with them but was too nice to tell them to fuck off). The final assessment was essentially that I didnt have any learning disabilities and was actually fairly intelligent.
Fast forward a few decades and now I am a doctor laughing at people melting down over Covid while they continue to overlook the much more sinister epidemic of obesity that has afflicted this country for decades.
Good luck people. If don't have at least a little bit of critical thinking skills then you're fucked. Fat, stupid and lazy is no way to go through life.
They basically told my parents that I had to get counseling or they would be reported to CPS for not getting me necessary treatment. Counseling consisted of sitting in a circle and saying something nice about ourselves, then saying something nice about the kid to our right, then repeating "I am special. No one in the world is like me. I am unique and valuable and people like me because I am [fill in adjective]" ad nauseam. I hated it. I ended up saying flatly "I am nice. --name of kid next to me-- is nice." And I remember just pretending to recite the stupid mantra, like pretending to sing in church. This was repeated for 30 minutes twice weekly for months. I was taken out of legitimate subjects like math for this BS.