Tonight with your 13 to 17 year old
The prompt
“Do you ever think about the environment when you're making everyday choices, or does that feel like someone else's problem?”
What to listen for
A thoughtful answer about specific choices, recycling, buying less, caring about waste, shows they feel some sense of personal responsibility toward something bigger than themselves, which is a healthy expansion of their values.
If they express some frustration or hopelessness about the scale of the problem, take that seriously rather than reassuring it away, that feeling is common and deserves to be heard, not fixed.
If they say it's not really on their radar, that's honest too, and doesn't need to be corrected tonight.
What this tells you
How they connect to environmental responsibility shows how far their sense of caring extends beyond their own immediate life.