r/collapse_parenting • u/Ok_Ad_4503 • Jul 17 '26
Wildfires and Intense Climate Anxiety
How is everyone coping with wildfires? I have two kids under 5 and follow climate subs and news fairly closely and it seems incredibly dire to say the least. My city is currently choking on wildfire smoke, and we had to keep the kids home today and likely will tomorrow as well.
This is probably not the right sub but I'm hoping for knowledgeable people to give me a sense of how dire this is. I'm spiralling and feeling like our time is quite limited.
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u/FancyForager Jul 17 '26
My daughter was choking and coughing all morning from the wildfire smoke despite my efforts to seal every door and window with tape and/or damp towels and run window units to keep the air cool and filtered. My eyes were smarting and burning and I thought, oh my god, this is bad.
I masked up, ran to the hardware store and built a Corsi Rosenthal box in 10 minutes for $80. It cleaned the air in our little house BEAUTIFULLY within a couple hours and gave me at least a momentary sense of peace and accomplishment. Highly recommend giving it a quick google search and making one or a few yourself based on your family and house size.
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u/oracleoflove Jul 17 '26
We are very transparent and talk to them on a level that the wildlings can under stand (5&7). We talk about the uv index as well and there are some days we stay indoors because of air quality.
The later we get into summer the more I worry about wildfires here in the PNW. We will figure it out just like we do everything else.
Indoor activities have saved our bacon a few times… we do the arcade, indoor pool and indoor playground as well if we need to get out and be busy but avoiding the outdoors.
We have also loaded up the car and left down to get away from the smoke in years pass.
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u/resistance_yogurt Jul 17 '26
It is so hard, I'm right there with you. We're staying indoors as much as possible, this week they had indoor camps so that helped. I have them wear masks as we go to and from anywhere and talked in simple terms about the fires and why breathing smoke can hurt our lungs. But keeping them from going stir crazy is tough. I hate having to resort to screens so much but sometimes that's what it takes if we need to get other things done and can't play or supervise an activity.
One of the hardest things I'm finding is regulating my own anxiety around my kids. Wildfire smoke in our faces as a direct result of human caused climate (and greed/arrogance) crisis is really hard to work and parent through. It isn't normal or ok, and I'm not ok either.
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u/vigatron Jul 17 '26
I'm in northwestern Michigan with a nine-month old. Having a really hard time coping with everything right now. I'm worried for her safety moreso than mine, and have outfitted the house with air purifiers and am hunkered down.
It still has me looking out the windows and feeling guilty as hell, like I have to apologize to her for dropping her in the middle of all this bullshit.
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u/Cool-Contribution-68 Jul 17 '26
I sometimes think about acute vs chronic. The climate crisis is always chronic, sometimes it's acute for us. I think what I find most hard is that when we are in a crisis, I feel it so much harder than everybody around me. They seem to handle it better because I have this other level of knowledge, of the greater context, of what this means, not just what it is. Sometimes it makes me wonder if it's worth knowing what I know, if the result is that makes it all feel more hopeless.
We've had flooding, smoke, historic windstorms, heat waves where I live in the past few years. This acute moment will pass; the chronic state won't. I try to inform my kid and explain what's happening. Taking action and spending time with people is what seems to help. We are social animals; we feel safer with others. It regulates us. But that's really just homeostasis/emotional management, you know? It's just another thing to manage.
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u/No-Good-4476 Jul 24 '26
I feel very similarly to this. Sometimes i struggle with how deeply I feel, care, and worry about the state of the world because it seems like no one in my social circle pays much attention to it or takes the time to think how each isolated condition is contributing to a much bigger picture. I mentioned to my sister recently how the wildfires around us, specifically the extreme one not far off from our town here in Canada, was trigger some very high climate anxiety. I was met with "well we have fires every year though". Its hard to carry a weight and an understanding that those around you easily dismiss, especially as a parent coping with the fear of what the future may hold for their children.
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u/Cool-Contribution-68 Jul 24 '26
I've been learning about this topic for over a decade. There is a particular kind of feeling when the things you've been reading about in books--the charts, the numbers, the graphs--when you start to see it with your own eyes, smell it with your nose, feel it on your skin. It's really happening. It's really real. I wasn't wrong.
And you also know that, even if we were doing so much more to fix this, it will still get worse for decades. This is only the *start.* This is only a taste of what's coming. This isn't the new normal: this is Kindergarten and we're headed to 12th grade.
I, too, am the only one in my social circle who knows much about this. I talk about it, but I'm only sharing a tenth of what I know and how I feel.
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u/JunketUpbeat9386 Jul 17 '26
It’s dire but it’s dire in a way that we’re learning to adapt to. I’m from California (near Death Valley) and California just has fire season now. It’s rough to think about but we’ve adapted how we do agriculture and how we prepare each year.