New Book: Parenting in a Changing Climate
“Bechard traverses the experience of parenting in the age of climate breakdown with insight, compassion, and uncompromising honesty. This beautifully-written book invites readers to come to terms with the grief and travails that accompany bringing new life into an increasingly damaged world. It’s a book that our time badly needs; and if you are a parent whose eyes are open, it’s a book that YOU need.”
-Professor Rupert Read, author of Parents for a Future: How loving our children can prevent climate collapse
I’m so excited to announce my new book, Parenting in a Changing Climate: Tools for cultivating resilience, taking action, and practicing hope in the face of climate change. This project has been a labor of love over the past year (you can read a little more about the backstory here), and has been published in partnership with Citrine Publishing on September 21, 2021. You can order it in paperback and ebook formats on Amazon here.
Book summary
What’s it like to wake up to the reality of climate change—while also trying to raise small children? As parents, how do we act on our values when we’re already exhausted from the day-to-day challenges of parenting? After an unconventional journey to motherhood that led to the birth of her twins in 2016, Elizabeth Bechard found herself struggling with an unshakeable sense of anxiety and grief about climate change during the most care-intensive season of motherhood. As a coach, she had also noticed a troubling trend of rising climate dread in her clients, all of whom were struggling with various forms of infertility and pregnancy loss. After several of her clients wondered aloud about whether the world was a place that babies would want to come, she knew she had to act.
Parenting in a Changing Climate blends intimate memoir with Elizabeth Bechard’s experience as a coach and researcher, drawing on science from the fields of climate psychology, science communication, resilience, health disparities, and behavior change. This book offers practical tools, resources, and inspiration for parents who are worried about the planet future generations will inherit and who want to find a way to cultivate resilience and take action on behalf of the children they love. Readers struggling to find their place in the climate movement will take away a clearer answer to the question our children will undoubtedly someday ask: what did you do once you knew the truth about climate change?
How to order
You can now order Parenting in a Changing Climate anywhere books are sold online, including through your local independent bookstore at IndieBound.org. If you have any questions about the book, feel free to email me at elizabeth@elizabethbechard.com. I can’t wait to share it with you.
Editorial reviews
“At a time when many people are questioning whether or not to have kids at all because of the severity of the climate crisis, Parenting in a Changing Climate does something profound. It calls for parents’ moral clarity, emotional intelligence and resilience, showing that these are indeed possible to practice when facing the crisis, and supports the climate-concerned who haven’t turned away from having kids despite the existential threat humanity now faces. Increasing numbers of people will be needing this book as ecological losses and a warming world bear down on their family relationships, and through it, they’ll find strength.” –Dr. Britt Wray, author of Gen Dread, Human and Planetary Health Fellow at Stanford University and LSHTM
“If our real job as humans is to engage more emotionally with the climate crisis then Elizabeth’s book is an invaluable tool in that process. She presents facts and fears with warmth and humour in a way that opens the road to all travellers. She very successfully blends the journey into and through parenthood with our parallel path into climate change and how we can live with the changes wrought by both. Elizabeth seemingly effortlessly combines well-researched data with personal experience and her years of working with families. This book articulated what I felt as a parent working on the climate crisis, but hadn’t ever put into words. You will find a newfound sense of your ability to make a difference and your relevance to the crisis. Beautiful, tender and truly eloquent, Elizabeth’s writing is at once gentle, funny, bluntly honest and heart-rending. She deftly handles two very emotive subjects in this, unbelievably, her first book. I very much hope that she writes more.” –Charly Cox, coach and Founder of Climate Change Coaches
“Bearing witness to a set of interlocking issues, including eco-anxiety and climate grief, Elizabeth Matteson Bechard has penned an extraordinarily sensitive, evocative, and beautifully moving portrait of parenthood in this time of severe climate disruption. Her book is heartbreaking, yet ultimately healing and validating to read. It is also one of the most immediately useful books I have read in years, including an invitation to simply feel what we are feeling, and to build our resilience, as first steps in moving towards meaningful and open conversations, and from there to engage in effective collective action. Any parent, or anyone considering having children, will find their concerns and thoughts reflected in these pages, along with tools and practices to move us in a positive direction.
The crux is that we would all do whatever it takes to protect our children, all children, and that is the call here. As she writes, ‘What would it take for us to act as if our collective house is on fire, acting with the same fierce protective instinct that guides us in caring for our families every day?’ Answering that call, she also helps us envision what our future could look like… ‘Somehow, one day at a time, we’ve become the parents our children needed us to be: parents who showed up when it mattered the most. Parents who helped to bring a future worth living for to life.’” –Peter Tavernise, coach and Executive Director of the Cisco Foundation
“Parenting in a Changing Climate: Tools for cultivating resilience, taking action, and practicing hope in the face of climate change is a highly personal and at the same time completely relatable account of a mother of young children waking up to the stark realities of our climate emergency. Bechard uses her background in public health and coaching to weave into her story practical actions and important questions for each of us to ponder including the most complicated question of all: “What did you do once you knew?” The book helps us find direct and straightforward ways to answer this question and many others and to build up our resiliency to face head on what lies ahead.” –Harriet Shugarman, award-winning author of How to Talk to Our Kids About Climate Change, Turning Angst into Action
“I love this book. It is told with honesty, integrity and vulnerability, is compassionate for self and the planet and it is embracing, insightful and has humor. Yes, it is a serious subject, but Elizabeth draws you in with wonderful stories (look forward to meeting Heimlich and some bugs!) highlighting the reality and challenges of parenthood, alongside of course the seriousness of what we are facing. Elizabeth has dealt with infertility personally and professionally, and the question “Are you sure you want the babies want to come?” still stays with me. It is such a powerful thought, when we reflect on climate change and the ecological crisis, and what this means for future generations. The book also makes clear the interconnectedness of the issues facing us – climate, economic and racial justice, as examples. Alongside this reality, we are offered a range of “tools” in the Appendices which I know will be useful to me both in my personal life and in my work.” -Eve Turner, co-founder, Climate Coaching Alliance, www.climatecoachingalliance.
“Parenting in a Changing Climate, by Elizabeth Bechard, is a brilliant and moving book about parenting and climate change, both highly readable and full of wisdom about the way forward. Bechard documents the heartbreaking nature of being a parent in these troubling times. At the same time, she offers inspiration about how any of us, however busy, can make a difference. She accomplishes this partly by her touchingly vulnerable account of her journey to carve out time for climate activism, despite the overwhelming demands of parenting twins in their first years of life. Bechard also includes valuable information, suggestions, and resources to help us cultivate resilience and take action around the climate and environmental justice issues. I cannot recommend this book too highly, not only to parents but also to all those concerned about our climate future.” –Katie Curtin, breakthrough coach, theatre artist, and author of The Happy Well-Fed Artist: How to Get Your Creative Project Off the Ground and Into the World, www.katiecurtin.com
What readers are saying
“Climate grief is a lonely ocean that can swallow you whole. Elizabeth’s book is a lifeboat. Her writing makes you feel scooped up, acknowledged – and heard. Her words make you feel truly and deeply understood. If the title has drawn you in, then as soon as you start reading you’ll be whispering “Yes! I feel that way too!” All the way through. Elizabeth weaves her own personal stories into each of the many perspectives on climate and ecological breakdown, and peppers every chapter with a gentle wisdom that I haven’t found anywhere else. Reading this book feels like you’re having a cup of tea and a chat with a dear friend who totally ‘gets’ it. It’s impossible not to feel better afterwards. I have been deeply comforted by Elizabeth’s words and gentle tone. Not just because all the messages she conveys throughout the book are so true and so important, but because reading them all made me feel so much less alone. I read this book during a very dark time when each headline was worse than the one before, and it lifted me completely; enabling me to find the energy and enthusiasm to continue on with my efforts to create a better world for my children. I don’t think I can really put into words how necessary this book is. Your only regret will be not reading it sooner.” -Antonia, early reader, U.K.
“I came to this book as a mother of a young child, already buzzing with anxiety over so many things that are going wrong with the world. Between the pandemic, gun violence, the charged political situation in the U.S., systemic racism, gender inequality, and so much more, climate change is definitely high on the list of things that keep me up at night as a parent and a citizen of the world. To be honest, I wasn’t sure if I was ready for this book. I felt so sure that it would add to my anxiety that I let it sit on my virtual bedside table for a few weeks before I started it. When I tell you that it had the exact opposite effect of what I was expecting, it only goes to show what an elegant job Elizabeth Bechard did in creating this book. If you’re like me and are already worried about what climate change will mean for your family, this book is probably for you… I was so pleasantly surprised by this book that I found myself wishing I had picked it up sooner! Just seeing that phrase “climate change” had become such a trigger for me that I immediately shut down. In reading the book I’ve learned that this response is a common one, and that the way through it is by finding ways to take small action every day, as well as to talk about climate change more, not less. If you’re like me and desperately want to make the world better for our kids but feel stuck on what more to do, I highly recommend this book!” –Maureen, early reader, U.S.
“This book is excellent. Part intimate memoir, this is not your average climate action guide, because it goes deeper and is way more practical in facing the emotions that often paralyze us despite a desire to take action. Bechard bravely confronts the heartbreaking and overwhelming reality of climate change with humanity, humor and vulnerability, while offering timely and practical strategies for parents looking to weave climate action into their already over-full lives, and to find resilience and hope in the face of climate change for themselves and their children.” –Stacey, early reader, U.S.
“Elizabeth so tenderly invites us into her own vulnerability as a parent and being in this world of change. She lends us her stories as a window for our collective healing… Her writing made my cry and laugh out loud within the first few pages of reading. I love that she has drawn on emergent practices such as those from the Good Grief Network and brings together her enquiring coaching mind, story-telling and practical steps to navigate the pain so many of us feel. Parents awakening to the multiple crises unfolding need anchors and guides right now to shift their pain into action, and move straight past despondency or terror. This book provides one of these anchors.” –Sarah Birch, Resilience Health Coach, South Africa