This year, on Easter Sunday, Robert Possnett was arrested in London during a protest with Extinction Rebellion , a group that uses nonviolent civil disobedience to raise awareness for climate change. It wasn't the first time the 59-year-old father of three had been arrested for protesting, and it won't be the last. His trouble with the law means he can't travel to the U.S. since he has a criminal record, but he's so committed to the cause that he doesn't care. He has a court date in October and it’s likely he will go to jail.

The responses to Jimenez’s tweet were swift and overwhelming, indicating that many people feel the same way. How can we get our parents to claim a bigger stake in this fight? (Jimenez's favorite suggestion was: "No grandbabies until the system is changed.")

Jimenez's tweet was inspired by a wedding her mom recently attended where she asked the caterers to stop automatically putting plastic straws into the drinks. "I was genuinely proud because this was something that I wasn't used to hearing from her," Jimenez said in an interview. "But at the same time we're still stuck in: my individual actions are the only thing I think I can do."

Last week, Nayeli Jimenez, a 29-year-old climate activist who works in publishing, tweeted: "How do I get my mom from 'I tell everyone I encounter to stop using plastic straws' kind of activism to 'let's dismantle the systems that uphold the power of the fossil fuel industry?' She's so committed, and I'm so proud, but how do we radicalize our parents is what I'm asking."

Many of us don’t have parents that are willing to be imprisoned in the name of the climate crisis. In the United States, there's a sizable disparity between young and old attitudes about global warming. Young people care more— 70 percent of Americans age 18 to 34 say they worry about climate change, compared to 56 percent of people 55 and up. If those young people want the world to take action, a major part of that project is convincing older people—who have a disproportionate amount of political power —that something needs to be done.

"What else am I going to do with my life?" Possnett said. "This is the biggest fight we've ever had. It's much bigger than World War II. There's nothing else I can do with my life but to make as much noise and stink as possible."

You might even find that your parents care more than you think they do, said Janet Swim, a social psychologist at Penn State. When people don’t talk to each other about major issues, they assume that others don’t care—so start to have those conversations.

You shouldn’t use your home-team advantage to only bombard your parents with facts, especially if they're starting out with a lot of hesitation. Lawson recommends a more natural conversation. In their study, they asked children to interview their parents without using the word “climate change” at all. Instead, they asked: "Have you seen the weather change over the last 10 years where we live? Do you see the sea level rise, or have you experienced it? How do you think that impacts our communities?"

"But typically when a parent is interacting with their child, they don't view their child through this lens of having an agenda," Lawson said. "It makes for a unique opportunity to open up conversation in a way that we struggle with in normal day to day life."

Lawson called this a case of "intergenerational learning," or the transfer of behavior and knowledge from children to parents. She thinks their study was successful partially because ideology and political identity have become so conflated with the climate crisis. When the children talked to their parents, it didn't carry the same baggage as if another adult tried to talk to your parents about global warming.

In a recent study in Nature Climate Change , Danielle Lawson, a postdoctoral student at NC State University, and her colleagues found that putting middle-school children in a class about climate change could influence their parent’s views on the subject. The effects were the strongest on conservative fathers—significant because conservative white men have been previously shown to have the lowest levels of climate concern.

In the past decade, social and behavioral psychologists have also been grappling with the best strategies to get people to do more about the environment. Their findings show that whether your parents are outright climate deniers or just need an extra push, there are ways to talk to them about the climate crisis that could inspire more action.

"You're walking around thinking you're all alone or just a few people do,' she said. 'Once you start talking about it, you start realizing other people share your opinion. Those conversations are kind of the groundwork for doing other things."

Figure out what's holding your parents back

In a 2011 article in American Psychologist, University of Victoria psychology professor Robert Gifford laid out seven domains of psychological barriers that stop people from reacting to climate change. Within those categories, he names 29 specific mental blocks, which he calls "dragons of inaction."

Reuven Sussman, a social and environmental psychologist at nonprofit the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, said that figuring out exactly which dragon you’re dealing with can be instrumental. "This is the number-one issue, I would say—you need to know your audience," Sussman said.

For example, one common dragon is that our brains have evolved to respond to clear and present danger, but we’re not wired well to deal with an abstract, far-off threat. If that seems to be your parent’s case, watching movies or documentaries that bring forth the emotions of urgency might get them to respond better, Sussman said. "Especially if you're asked to put yourself in the position of one of the main characters."

That could also help if your parents' dragon is ignorance, but probably not if they're worried about financial risks or feel "system justification," the desire to uphold the status quo. In that case, talking less about environmental effects of global warming, and more about the anticipated social and financial ones could be a better way to reach them. Once you figure out exactly where a parent’s hesitation lies, you can get creative with your approaches.

Use behavioral psychology tricks

There’s a social psychology theory called idiosyncratic credit theory. It says that when you’re in a group, you earn credit by conforming to the group’s norms, but then you can cash in those credits to propose new ideas or changes. This means that if you compromise and act agreeable, it can put you in a better position in your family to get them to make real change.