Laura Schifter

Senior Fellow at the Aspen Institute, where she leads This Is Planet Ed, an initiative advancing education as a climate solution; she is also a Senior Advisor with SustainableED at Brown University’s Annenberg Institute.

Children’s Climate Media Must Pair Honest Facts With Agency

Children are already experiencing climate disruption, and adults should not respond by leaving them to make sense of it alone, Laura Schifter argued in an Aspen Ideas: Climate panel with Al Roker, Sesame Workshop’s Kay Wilson Stallings and producer J.J. Johnson. The panelists said children’s media should match facts and emotional stakes to a viewer’s age—from nature and small acts of care for preschoolers to more direct accounts of danger for older children—while giving them characters, trusted adults and practical ways to act rather than asking them to carry the problem themselves.

The Aspen InstituteJul 30, 202612 min read