**8. Conclusions**

Eco-anxiety is a reality in the lives of many children. Given the impact of climate destruction upon children's lives, their anxiety about the threats posed for themselves and other species and for the life of the planet is an appropriate response: *not* responding with anxiety to such grave danger would be highly problematic. However, for individual children and others, living with chronic anxiety also can be harmful. The practical theological turn toward transformation that puts care and justice side by side retrieves the ecotheological theme of the inhabitance in God's *oikos*, to support human children *and* the other-thanhuman members of the planetary household. Practices of care for children entail nurturing them in awareness of their embeddedness within that ecology toward the kind of deep commitment of faith that issues in wisdom—*ecosophia*—to heal the earth and live well within its diverse ecology.n the end, we are left with the practical theological question of what it would take to attend well to children experiencing eco-anxiety in the world that God created and loves? I am taken by the notion from Pope Francis' environmental manifesto, *Laudato Si* (Pope Francis 2015), that what is needed is nothing short of *ecological conversion* (See especially Ayres 2017; Calder and Morgan 2016; Hanchin and Hearlson 2020; Hearlson 2020, 2021; Helsel 2018; McCarroll 2020; Miller-McLemore 2020; Robinson and Wotochek 2021). Van Schalkwyk's "oikos cycle of care", for example, while not a prescription for "fixing" the anxiety children suffer over climate destruction, does sugges<sup>t</sup> a pattern for the conversion that must take place for ecological justice to take root. Ayres' call for religious education toward inhabitance is not only for children. However, children suffering from eco-anxiety will certainly benefit from a religious education that fosters ecological kinship and invites activism on behalf of the ecosphere that is God's *oikos* (and ours). Plenty of evidence exists today that practical theology and its subfields are in the midst of an ecological turn, increasingly centering concerns over climate change and ecological consciousness in our work. It is time to bring this focus home to children with further theological reflections on childhood, ecology, and climate anxiety.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.
