Greta Thunberg’s mother opens up on teenager’s childhood struggles
Climate change activism helped Greta Thunberg overcome bullying and an eating disorder, the teenager’s mother has revealed in a new book.
The Thunberg family detailed the 17-year-old’s early life in Our House is on Fire: Scenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisis, due to be published in March.
In an extract published on The Observer, opera singer Malena Ernman explained that her daughter started struggling with selective mutism and eating disorder at the age of 11.
“She was slowly disappearing into some kind of darkness and little by little, bit by bit, she seemed to stop functioning,” Ernman wrote.
“She stopped playing the piano. She stopped laughing. She stopped talking. And she stopped eating.”
Thunberg lost 10kgs in two months. Her parents later found out she was experiencing bullying at school, ranging from being shoved in the playground to being “lured to strange places”. But the school thought it was “Greta’s own fault”, because other students reported that she had “behaved strangely and spoken too softly”, Ernman wrote.
Thunberg was later diagnosed with Asperger’s and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
She turned a corner after watching a film in class one day about rubbish in the oceans. The whole class was affected, but her classmates soon moved on to other topics, including their teacher’s upcoming trip to New York and other cities with great shopping.
“Greta can’t reconcile any of this with any of what she has just seen,” her mother wrote. “She saw what the rest of us did not want to see. It was as if she could see our CO2 emissions with her naked eye.”
In the summer of 2018, Thunberg began her first school strike for the climate and started eating again. Her protests started gaining traction around the world.
“We get death threats on social media, excrement through the letter box, and social services report that they have received a great number of complaints against us as Greta’s parents,” her mother wrote.
“But at the same time they state in the letter that they ‘do NOT intend to take any action’. We think of the capital letters as a little love note from an anonymous official. And it warms us.”