Parental mentalisation of climate change during parent-child climate conversations: A qualitative investigation

To examine how parents mentalise climate change during parent-child climate conversations and clarify the relational processes through which such conversations may support regulation, meaning-making or escalation of distress.

Qualitative cross-sectional study.

Forty-five Italian parents of at least one child aged 6-18 years participated in online semi-structured interviews. Eligible participants had discussed climate change with their child at least once in the last six months. Interviews explored how parents understood the child's climate-related thoughts and emotions, responded to dysregulation or rupture, handled uncertainty and conflicting information, interpreted social influences and discussed responsibility, action and future-oriented concerns. Data were analysed using Reflexive Thematic Analysis.

Four themes were generated. Theme 1, Mentalisation under climate threat, captured how parents identified children's climate-related imaginaries, contained affect and repaired non-mentalising shifts. Theme 2, Epistemic regulation in climate talk, concerned how parents evaluated climate claims, calibrated trust and handled uncertainty without false reassurance or catastrophic certainty. Theme 3, Climate talk in a wider social world, described how parents helped children think about denial, ridicule, peer belonging and moral outrage. Theme 4, Agency and future meaning in climate contexts, concerned how parents calibrated action, protected children from responsibility-saturated coping and responded to climate-shaped future thinking.

Parent-child climate conversations function less as information exchange than as relational episodes in which affect regulation, epistemic trust, social meaning-making, and responsibility are negotiated. The findings support parental climate mentalising as a clinically relevant form of parental reflective functioning under ecological stress.