TAIT: If Our Youth Are Our Future, We Have To Look Out For Them

Columnists

Published Aug 12, 2023 • Last updated 3 hours ago • 2 minute read

Two young girls turn cartwheels in a fenced yard A significant portion of today’s young people, 62 per cent, feel an obligation to take action on climate change. Photo by iStock /Getty Images

The afternoon sun was warmly welcomed Saturday in Edmonton, a delightful day for children to be engaged and enjoying the abundance of outdoor activities the atmospheric pressure allows.

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You know the wonderful images, don’t you? Playing at nearby playground, or running through sprinkler, or a bike ride, a walk in the park of the rugged Forrest, or water-skiing, or boating, or tubbing or catching sun rays on your favourite beach.

Without raining on any of those visual delights, a spinning question, much like a softball in the weekend’s countless softball tournaments, must be asked, urgently and on target.

How fast is the clock ticking before our precious planet suffers enough damage — neglect, too, although we are slow to admit such a collective colossal oversight — that life on earth will be impossible?

The good folks at the United Nations never miss a beat.

They declared Saturday as International Youth Day. Its theme — Green Skills for Youth: Towards a Sustainable World — will undauntedly gather some much needed attention.

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Just look to Statistics Canada. A 2019 survey points to 62 per cent of young people in Canada feel an obligation to address, and take action on, climate change.

If we put the survey findings under the microscope we see a large majority of Canadians aged between 18 and 34 would, in fact, put their money where their mouths are by contributing an extra $100 a month to fund climate-change initiatives.

That, dear reader, is golden.

But with such a, hopefully, potential game-changer movement, comes another challenge we must not only tightly embrace, buy act upon with seriousness and responsibility.

Every generation of youth is presented with challenges reflecting the current status of society.

The generation previous to me, for example, had the horrors which, for those engaged in the theatre of war, turn into everlasting, daunting, eerie ghosts.

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Perhaps, it was post traumatic syndrome disorder before its earliest diagnosis.

It’s interesting. Young Canadian men and women were called to duty: the same demographic of folks which today have a concern for climate change.

We must ensure those young people — tomorrow’s leaders — are prepared mentally to take on this most gigantic noble task.

Today’s society fails our young people in so many ways.

Family Service Canada gives some jarring information on issues facing young people from a 2020 report put together by UNICEF.

Thirty-two per cent of Canadian kids aged 11 to 15 experience weekly headaches, insomnia and stomach troubles, symptoms of stress.

In most other wealthy nations 14 per cent of the same age don’t feel supported by their families. In Canada: 26 per cent.

Bullying. It continues to sharply rise, with 20 per cent of Canadian kids saying, yes, they have been bullied.

And the most telling of all, the rate of 100,000 of Canadians aged 15 to 19 dying from suicide is 9.0.

For those of us in supportive roles — from baseball coach to behavioural psychologist — the challenge rings with reverent importance.

The people who are charged with saving the planet first must be saved themselves.

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