How can we help parents to engage in climate advocacy?

Understanding the barriers for parents

“I don’t have the solutions for them. And that feels quite difficult, as a parent.” 

That’s how one mother described the weight of climate change when thinking about her children. She’s not alone — many parents echo her sentiments and feel a similar duty to act against climate change but struggle to know how and where to start. 

For these climate-conscious parents, climate advocacy can be a daunting cause to get involved in, made even more difficult to access by emotional, material, and social obstacles. 

To understand these barriers and how they could be overcome, Hope for the Future partnered with The London School of Economics (LSE), launching a 3-month project that brought together undergraduate researchers and parent attendees of HFTF’s political advocacy workshops in candid conversations about their worries, their daily lives, and what would make climate action feel possible. 

The research project 

Between January and March of 2026, a group of fourteen LSE students set out to interview twelve parents about their experiences with climate advocacy. Four of these parents were recruited from Contact, an organisation representing parents of children with disabilities, while the remaining eight were members of Parents for Future (PFF). 

While small, this sample size gave us the opportunity to hear from families across the UK, with a diverse range of backgrounds and unique experiences. 

In interviews ranging from 21 minutes to 103 minutes in length, our team was able to gain insight into how parents approached thinking about climate change and the factors that helped or held them back from taking action. 

The research findings: the emotional and practical toll of climate change on parents

Parents we spoke to overwhelmingly reported deep and raw emotional reactions to climate change, revealing the toll that climate anxiety and advocacy take on their mental health and the barriers these feelings can create to further climate-related action. 

For one parent, thinking about the world their child would grow up in led to panic attacks. For another, constant fighting and advocacy work left them feeling fatigued and burnt out at their ‘breaking point’. 

Our interviews also indicated that parents view climate change through a material lens — on both a personal and global level. Parents expressed climate change’s effects on daily costs of living as one of their most immediate concerns. At the same time, parents identified and acknowledged climate change’s broader consequences on food scarcity, altered supply chains, immigration, political polarisation, and issues of global justice.

The importance of community

When asked to reflect on the advocacy workshops held by HFTF and their personal experiences trying to get involved, parents we interviewed emphasised how important it was for them to feel supported and uplifted by a community of like-minded activist parents. 

By making it clear that they were not alone and support was close at hand, this community element was key to making parents more motivated to engage politically and stay motivated to fight despite the barriers and setbacks they faced. 

Reflections of parents with special needs and disabled children

Finally, our interview cohort of parents of children with special needs and disabilities (SEND) highlighted the often overlooked realities of climate advocacy for parents with additional caring responsibilities. 

These parents frequently discussed how duties to the climate conflicted with duties of care, forcing them to (understandably) prioritise their children’s health and wellbeing over climate-related activities. 

Additionally, parents of disabled children noted how their positions in an already-isolated group made it even more difficult to access the kinds of supportive communities that could help them to engage in climate action. 

Where do we go from here? 

Based on these interviews, it is clear that parents don’t lack concern about climate change. What they lack is the support and connection that turns concern into lasting action in the face of emotional discouragement and isolation. This produces powerful knowledge for charities and civil society organisations like HFTF, and suggests that they can help parents overcome these barriers in the following ways: 

1. Emotional reactions to climate change and climate anxiety are not exclusively negative: this energy can be harnessed productively to motivate parents to push for the climate action they wish to see 

2. Calls to action can appeal to parents more effectively when climate issues are framed in terms of their immediate economic, material, and social well-being 

3. Strong community building in advocacy spaces builds resilient, motivated advocates 

4. Parents of children with disabilities face higher barriers to climate action, and require more dedicated and tailored support to help overcome them.