“Feels Like a Drop in the Ocean”: Parenting Children Amid the Climate Change Era

Parenting unfolds amid accelerating climate change, reshaping how adults understand responsibility, emotion, and everyday family life. We examined Italian parents’ lived experiences and meaning-making using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis of nine semi-structured interviews (eight mothers, one father). Five interlinked themes were identified: (1) “Living in the forecast”: Parenthood as a temporal and intergenerational lens (past, present, and future); (2) “Panic, fear… and a spark”: Emotional ambivalence, solastalgia, and eco-grief; (3) “Honestly, we stay shut indoors”: Everyday life reorganized by climate constraints and family adaptations; (4) “My efforts are not enough” and “Not terror, but awareness”: Parental agency between helplessness and educational responsibility; (5) “Feels like a drop in the ocean”: Polarized coping from denial to guilt. Together, accounts portray climate change as an intimate, relational condition rather than a distant risk, saturating identity, care, and family practices. Findings extend environmental psychology by foregrounding intergenerational place-loss and the paradox of micro-agency within macro-helplessness, and they suggest supports that normalize eco-emotions, scaffold developmentally attuned communication, and connect parents to collective resources. Italy─a climate-vulnerable, family-centric context─offers a case for policy that treats parental well-being as climate adaptation. Implications span prevention, family services, and environmental communication, and invite longitudinal and cross-national research on parenting under climate stress. First qualitative study on Italian parents’ meaning-making of climate change. Climate change reshapes parents’ temporal horizons and intergenerational responsibility. Parents oscillate between fear, hope, eco-grief, solastalgia, and guilt. Climate change restructures family routines and everyday parenting practices. Parents feel helpless globally but are active in educating their children about climate change.