Raising Anti-Doomers: How to Bring Up Resilient Kids Through Climate Change and Tumultuous Times

by Ariella Cook-Shonkoff MFT ATR

352 pages, Hardcover

Published August 19, 2025

Reviews

[Ray boycott Reading Challenges until they fix app]

4 ratings? Maybe double that spread across the three separate listings on Goodreads? What's going on here? And people wonder why I changed my username....

Anyway, I usually avoid giving ratings to books I'm not an SME in or otherwise can't authenticate to avoid risk of effectively endorsing bad advice (or vise-versa), especially when it comes to pop-psy. But what I am a genuine SME at with provable credentials is just basic communication and this represents an abysmal failure at it. Quite frankly, it's part of something of a trend I've been noticing when it comes to recent pop-psy especially aimed at parents, and I can only label that trend as parental slop.

I'll just get into the bad stuff before I highlight the good: most of the book is non-stationary epistolary-adjacent useless rambling incoherent nonsense. I'm not a parent, but I was hoping to get some sort of insight for my own anxieties all the same (which at least makes up most of the good I'll get into). The actual "how to not turn your kids into doomers" part doesn't start until pg. 205 in what's effectively a 300 page book. Most of the book is just very vaguely, very generically, addressing environmental issues - which don't get me wrong, I'm all for - but Cook-Shonkoff addresses them in the most useless, I-Can't-Believe-It's-Not-A-YouTuber Lecture manner possible. You know how your YouTube feed is (ironically) polluted with videos from insta-experts who became SMEs because their view counts were first past the post of some algorithmic metric and nothing else, talking about how we "can't recycle our way out of this" without offering any alternatives whatsoever? Yeah, that's what we got here. Cook-Shonkoff has a whole section on "personal greenwashing", and yet that's effectively what all of her "practical solutions" amount to, many of which can come off outright counterproductive or at least tone-deaf, meaningless and, what some might ironically dismiss as being "terminally online" (one list of suggested things to do, among actually useful stuff like "build a little free library" and "start a PhD program" includes "take a CBD gummy and see what happens", "use a Q-tip. Thrice. On each ear" [in direct violation of the warning label, I might add], and "ask this question to ChatGPT: Is ChatGPT worth it to humans?" It's also not clear if Cook-Shonkoff is serious or sarcastic with this list, but then again, she sucks at communicating). The suggested art therapy sessions also don't really seem to address climate change at al-oh who am I kidding. Nothing here addresses climate change, not the "watching a video on how an EV car works" before buying an EV exercise, changing out winter clothes for summer ones, or making an image board of how you'd like to see positive environmentalism and yes these are serious exercises Cook-Shonkoff suggests you do. I'll let you in on a little secret: want to enact serious environmentalism? Push for environmentally-positive/forward legislation and regulation. Write to your goddamned senators. Sensible environmental regulations going back to the 60s wouldn't completely arrest climate change, but would do more than just buy time until technological advancements and evolved, refined policies and regulation can> help with that - until a certain "Grand Old" party kept rolling back these regulations for decades until the logical conclusion with the 45th president to get elected. Passing on the buck or responsibility to the consumer, including recycling or disposal fees, isn't going to solve anything either and just disproportionately punishes the poor and encourages fees-skirting, including dumping (so far Mikki Kendall, author of Hood Feminism seems to be one of the few to actually bother to recognize this). Cook-Shonkoff also constantly references an acronym, "MHW", and I just about drove myself crazy looking for its definition by re-reading every chapter before its first appearance multiple times before slowing coming to the realization that she never actually does define it. Again, she sucks as a communucator. So in such absence, I guess it's left to me to define what the hell it is, and I just want to say that I do inherently understand kids' anxiety over the Martian Hobgoblin Wars but like with the climate crisis Cook-Shonkoff poorly addresses actual solutions (as usual, it'll all have to be left to Spider-Man, I guess).

But there are good things to say too: this is a waaay better book on introductory self-care and self-diagnosis in preparation to seeking professional mental health care than it is about "raising anti-doomers". And by that I mean, it does have a useful survey for self-diagnosing Adverse Childhood Experiences; it does have useful, clear (for once!) definitions of emotional and trauma responses, and a very abbreviated but still very helpful color-coded emotions chart (still in grayscale print no less!) But, first I just want to stress the caveat of bringing this up with a mental health professional as opposed to strictly making a self-diagnosis, and, if the best thing I can say about this is a glorified Tiger Beat style "which trauma reaponse are you?" survey that you can probably just look up online, well, that really just says everything there now, doesn't it?

UPDATE: I just want to say I completely forgot Samantha Bee of all people has a blurb on the dust jacket and I'm like yeah that completely checks.

[Adelina]

August 2024:
Reviewed by @literary.listener

Thanks @netgalley for the ARC.

This wasn't my cup of tea. The content was good and I enjoyed the prompts. But it took me a long time to get through it. I felt like I struggled with it. But my struggle had a lot to do with the content. Some of the things in the book I haven't thought to stress about. 🤣 Then as I was reading it I just sat there going..."oh no...". So it triggered a response in me, much like how I could not get through The Body Keeps the Score. I would rather just not think about things that I didn't have on my mind to be stressed about.

So while it was in some ways enjoyable to read the prompts and the relaxing sections.l, it just was too heavy for me. But if you are more of the medical mindset and ok with the state of the world I think this would be spot on!

[Abbey Gates]

I do not typically enjoy parenting books. Without structural analysis alongside their very specific list of dos and don’ts, parenting books can feel out of touch at best and shame-y at worst. I found this book to be truly helpful in that it gave very concrete and tangible ways to talk about climate change that held the truth (and the terror) alongside activities, framing, and mental health strategies to navigate the accompanying anxiety and fear in age appropriate ways for kids and adults. I also thought the family activities were creative and helpful ideas for connecting more authentically with planet earth. Fuck billionaires and fossil fuels! My god!

[Karen]

Want to talk to your kids about being anti-doomers? Read Chapter 7. The rest of this book goes from fairly innocuous to downright off-topic to what the title promises. It's like the author had enough for an article on the topic. The rest is just filler. Just don't bother with the whole book. I said what I said.

[Dana]

Practical, timely, refreshing. I highly recommend!