Through their special tendencies to explore the world, children may generate a particularly diverse set of cultural variants, potentially helping populations adapt in times of environmental change (Fogarty & Kandler, Reference Fogarty and Kandler2020; Smaldino et al., Reference Smaldino, Moser, Pérez Velilla and Werling2024). Whether stable peer cultures form and whether they influence wider cultural dynamics not only depends on the way children learn and interact themselves but on the demographic and cultural forces guiding information flow among age groups. For example, in post-industrial societies, demographic shifts to lower mortality and fertility reduce the number of younger individuals and might, therefore, make it harder for peer cultures to form. At the same time, widespread online communication might facilitate information exchange among peers, and greater parental emphasis on children’s preferences might promote bottom-up transmission within households, both increasing the cultural influence younger generations have.

Cultural evolutionary models are ideal tools to disentangle the complex interactions between micro-level social interactions and macro-level societal outcomes, providing principled predictions about the prerequisites and impact of peer cultures (Smaldino, Reference Smaldino2023). Importantly, to build more realistic models of children’s role in cultural transmission, cultural information cannot be studied in isolation. Instead, we must investigate social dynamics in populations where average life spans, family size, and the age distribution are not hard-coded but arise endogenously from demographic processes (Deffner & McElreath, Reference Deffner and McElreath2022). This is important because cultural traits evolve within ever-changing populations, and the relative size of different age groups as well as the connectivity between them will crucially shape the emergence and impact of peer cultures. Such simulations follow dynamically changing populations of agents as they are born, grow up, have offspring, and, eventually, die. On top of realistic demographics, researchers can contrast the effect of different cultural transmission pathways on metrics like cultural diversity, complexity, or success rates of new adaptive variants. As a more realistic demography is introduced, model complexity increases rapidly, requiring even more careful examination of assumptions and targeted model analysis. Still, to truly appreciate the potential role of children in cultural evolution, we need to embrace that additional complexity and study the intricate interplay between demography and culture.

Even if cultural evolutionary models can help identify abstract forces shaping peer cultures, it is not trivial to close the gap between theoretical models and real-world data – an important outstanding issue in cultural evolution (Deffner et al., Reference Deffner, Fedorova, Andrews and McElreath2024). Despite the wealth of plausible anecdotes reported by Lew-Levy and Amir, we still need convincing case studies demonstrating that peer culture and bottom-up transmission have a quantitative impact on cultural change. We argue that sustainable behavior, and plant-based diets in particular, could be such a case study. Climate change is probably the most serious and rapidly evolving adaptive challenge we are currently facing, threatening not only global ecosystem functioning and biodiversity but also human health and well-being (IPCC, Reference Lee and Romero2023; Grant et al., Reference Grant, Vanderkelen, Gudmundsson, Fischer, Seneviratne and Thiery2025). Cultural evolution has been nominated as a powerful framework to model and predict responses to climate change as well as to guide possible interventions (Pisor, Lansing, & Magargal, Reference Pisor, Lansing and Magargal2023; Turner et al., Reference Turner, Singleton, Harris, Harryman, Lopez, Arthur and Jones2023). Not only did the younger generation found “Fridays for Future,” inspiring parental and grandparental generations to follow them with “Parents for Future” and “Grandparents for Future,” but younger generations are also more likely to support ambitious climate policies (Belz et al., Reference Belz, Follmer, Hölscher, Stiess, Sunderer and Birzle-Harder2022; Tyson, Kennedy, & Funk, Reference Tyson, Kennedy and Funk2021); and, at least partially, they also adopt more sustainable behaviors. For example, adolescents in Germany reduced their meat consumption compared to the generation of their parents: the percentage of 14- to 29-year-olds eating vegetarian or vegan diets increased from 12% in 2019 to 20% in 2024; this is 2.5 times higher than in their parents’ age group (45–59 years), with 8% in 2024 (Bundesministerium für Ernährung und Landwirtschaft, 2019, 2024). They also frequently state sustainability as a key reason for their diets (Zühlsdorf et al., Reference Zühlsdorf, Jürkenbeck, Schulze and Spiller2021) and have been identified as potential drivers of more sustainable eating, particularly when the younger generation argues for sustainable eating or engages in sustainable eating themselves (Knobl & Mata, Reference Knobl and Mata2024; Mata, Knobl & Takezawa, Reference Mata, Knobl and Takezawa2025).

Understanding the role of younger generations for adaptive cultural change within a cultural evolutionary framework requires three major steps (Deffner et al., Reference Deffner, Fedorova, Andrews and McElreath2024): (1) Building complementary models that formalize scientific understanding of how a certain behavior is acquired and passed on between individuals. Such models allow simulating how the frequencies of behavioral alternatives in the population change over time as a function of different forms of social influence, such as peer learning or conformity to norms. Simulations could, for example, also determine how many young “innovators” are required for social innovations like plant-based diets to succeed, or how homophilic interactions or selective displays of behaviors influence their spread. (2) Estimating those social-influence parameters from data, using, for example, large-scale longitudinal or historical data sets. This allows inferring how individual choices are influenced by the choices of others and how important hypothesized psychological processes really are. (3) Linking individual-level processes back to population dynamics by simulating from the models based on the parameter values inferred from the data. Such simulations allow testing in silico how adaptive climate behaviors might spread in the future and probing how different interventions might facilitate that spread. For instance, we could simulate the consequences of children-planned family meals (Knobl & Mata, Reference Knobl and Mata2024; Mata, Knobl & Takezawa, Reference Mata, Knobl and Takezawa2025), advertisement campaigns targeting certain age groups, or programs fostering political engagement among youths.

In sum, combining cultural evolutionary simulations with real-world data on sustainable behaviors could provide a uniquely relevant test case for the role of younger generations in adaptive cultural change. Understanding such processes also allows building political institutions that could facilitate the spread of up-to-date information and adaptive practices. If younger generations, introducing and experimenting with more sustainable practices, indeed provide an untapped resource for successful climate action, it becomes a key societal challenge to facilitate the diffusion of those practices, as well as to find novel ways to better integrate the perspectives of younger generations, promoting societies that are better prepared for the major challenges ahead.