British parents need to adapt to climate chaos – but not by abandoning the great outdoors | Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett

Try telling a cooped-up child they can’t go out due to global heating. Luckily, we can learn from our European neighbours

Like all children, I hated rainy days. What I didn’t realise until I had my own baby was how my parents probably hated them, too. Cooped up, whingeing babies can make cooped up, whingeing babies of their adult caregivers, too. “Get outside every day,” people tell you, but you find yourself and the child all wrapped up and ready to go and standing in a doorway watching the showers come down in biblical sheets. A 2016 study that found that British children spend less time outdoors than prison inmates started to make a little bit more sense.

I have sung a lot of Singin’ in the Rain this past winter, and then spring, but sometimes I’ve been crying on the inside. I don’t get seasonal affective disorder, but by April my spirits were starting to feel low. The weather feels personal now, in a way that it never did before, when I could hunker down with a book or a film or a glass of red wine and a record. Now stormy weather means trying to find endless entertainment for a baby who loves nothing more than being outside and watching the wind shake the leaves. It couldn’t have been more different than the spring we brought him into the world: our postpartum euphoria as we walked him through sunlit streets, long lunches of seafood pasta while he slept in the pram, pink blossom falling like snowflakes on the day we registered his birth. This year, it’s been so wet that he’s only just touched grass.