Guest essay by Eric Worrall

According to the abstract this propaganda technique, indoctrinating children with educational material deliberately designed to help them influence parents, is particularly effective on Conservative men when the influencer is their daughter.

Children can foster climate change concern among their parents

Published: 06 May 2019

Danielle F. Lawson, Kathryn T. Stevenson, M. Nils Peterson, Sarah J. Carrier, Renee L. Strnad & Erin Seekamp 

The collective action that is required to mitigate and adapt to climate change is extremely difficult to achieve, largely due to socio-ideological biases that perpetuate polarization over climate change. Because climate change perceptions in children seem less susceptible to the influence of worldview or political context, it may be possible for them to inspire adults towards higher levels of climate concern, and in turn, collective action. Child-to-parent intergenerational learning—that is, the transfer of knowledge, attitudes or behaviours from children to parents — may be a promising pathway to overcoming socio-ideological barriers to climate concern. Here we present an experimental evaluation of an educational intervention designed to build climate change concern among parents indirectly through their middle school-aged children in North Carolina, USA. Parents of children in the treatment group expressed higher levels of climate change concern than parents in the control group. The effects were strongest among male parents and conservative parents, who, consistent with previous research, displayed the lowest levels of climate concern before the intervention. Daughters appeared to be especially effective in influencing parents. Our results suggest that intergenerational learning may overcome barriers to building climate concern.

Read more (paywalled): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-019-0463-3

Sadly the fully study is paywalled, so we don’t know who in North Carolina authorised this experiment, and whether parents gave full informed consent, before their children were used by greens as social engineering guinea pigs.