Don’t Use Santa to Scare Children About Climate Change

My friend Neil Hedley, who runs the awesome Dad site Dadditudes.com tagged me in a Facebook post this afternoon to goad me into a discussion he was having in regards to a new online holiday-inspired video produced by Greenpeace on the topic of Climate Change.  Neil felt the video totally crossed the line, and so I took the bait and decided to watch the video, which I have included below for you to watch as well.

Over the past 5 years I’ve been given the opportunity to speak to more than 20,000 students across Canada on the subject of Climate Change.  I’ve seen what gets their attention and what doesn’t.  I’ve seen what inspires them and what makes them indifferent.  From that experience along with my personal experience as a father of 4, and from my 20+ years of experience in media, marketing and communications, I can only draw one conclusion about this video.

The message is real, but they’ve chosen to deliver it the wrong way.

While the mass commercialization of Christmas is something that I’ve grown to detest, and to a certain degree Santa is a representation of this, it still remains that where young children are concerned, Santa is a bit of a sacred cow.  Eventhough the bottom line is that Santa brings stuff, he doesn’t do so unless children are good.  Society has created a figure that children idolize almost by default and to take that figure and use it to generate fear in children crosses a line that I don’t believe should be crossed.

While I’m sure Greenpeace knew this message would shock many, and that negative feedback is inevitable to whatever extent, I don’t think they grasped what might happen if this pisses off parents more than it scares children.  Messages that shock can work, but they can also backfire and suggesting that Santa may drown or that the North Pole will sink is one way to do that.

Essentially Greenpeace is taking a fictional aspect of childhood and morphing it into a grim reality that citizens of the world must come to grips with.  The childhood fantasy represented by Santa Claus should not be leveraged against the adult reality of dealing with something that is real and potentially catastrophic.  A child likely won’t be able to correlate the two and scaring children on purpose is both mean-spirited and somewhat reprehensible.

While I think it is completely appropriate to educate children about the reality of climate change, and how human activity is principally behind what we have been increasingly having to deal with, it must not be done with fear and despair.

When I speak to students I often make them realize of the great opportunity that they have to become part of the solution.  I explain to them that while the origins of this problem may not be attached to them, by shifting the paradigm and taking ownership of the problem, they stand to gain tremendously by creating and being a part of the solution.

It is far more effective in a case like this to provide children with hope and motivation rather than fear and despair. 

Greenpeace may well be trying to get to the same end goal as myself and millions of others around the world, but their opportunistic decision to bring a mythical figure like Santa into the equation, with a healthy dose of scaring the crap out of the millions of kids who love him has negated any gains they thought they could have made.

If Greenpeace wants to scare the crap out of some adults and politicians about this issue…they can be my guest, but they need to do themselves a favour and leave both Santa and little kids out of it altogether.