One of the most vivid memories of my Cold War childhood was of my dad tucking me into bed one night at the height of tensions with Russia.

I asked my father what would happen if we went to war and the Russians won.

“They’ll make us their slaves,” he said calmly, turning out the light. “Now good night, sweet dreams.”

Sweet dreams? Of what, me milking Siberian cows and clipping the toenails of Nikita Khrushchev?

Talk of nuclear war was everywhere in those days and neighbors argued about the morality of building fallout shelters. For instance, what would you do if you had the only shelter on the street and all of your friends were trying to get in as the bombs were dropping, but you only had enough supplies for your immediate family?

“We’ll just die in the blast,” my father declared, when my mother asked if we should start digging. “That would be better than sitting in a smelly tomb for months eating Ritz crackers.”

If it came right down to it, I preferred Russian slavery to death, but didn’t dare voice that opinion to my father.

I’m reminded of this because people of my generation know a thing or two about public hysteria and what it does to kids. So trust me when I say that brainwashing youngsters with doomsday scenarios of global warming is not good for them.

The left needs to cut it out, stop using kids as surrogates for their radical agenda and accept responsibility for upticks in suicide and depression in youngsters as a result of their scare campaign.

Fans of the HBO series “Big Little Lies” - a show about five neurotic Monterey, CA mothers and their children - will remember the episode in the second season where one of the precocious second graders had an anxiety attack in class and had to be hospitalized. Turned out she was severely stressed over climate change, which was being preached in the classroom.

The mother, played by Laura Dern, stormed the school and lectured the principal and teacher for terrifying the children.

I was surprised by the episode, a rare instance of Hollywood toying with the notion that climate panic is overblown and that perhaps frightening kids is unhealthy.

Which brings us, not just to the Swedish girl who’s being treated like some sort of climate Rasputin by the left, but to the fevered, apocalyptic fear-mongering that’s going on in public schools and elsewhere.

It is possible to believe the climate is changing without buying into the hype that we’ll all be dead in 12 (or 20, 50 or 100) years.

During Friday’s climate strike millions of kids reportedly skipped school to protest plastic straws and meat and capitalism and fossil fuels and greenhouse gases and all the other things that supposedly have brought humanity to the brink of destruction. In some school districts, superintendents offered to sign absentee slips for kids who wanted to miss class, outraging some parents who wanted their offspring in school, not on the streets..

Then there was yesterday’s speech to world leaders at the UN by the young Swede who we’ve been told is exempt from criticism because she suffers from anxiety disorders and Asperger’s. 

I don’t pick on kids anyway, so I will say only this: I feel sorry for her and for other children who have had their childhoods nuked by manipulative parents, politicians, teachers and other hysterics.

While it makes for dramatic television to have a child angrily scolding adults who have given her a world filled with modern medicine, healthy foods, technology, vaccines and a life expectancy that is decades longer than her ancestors, it is simply heartbreaking to see someone so winsome and young be so distraught, pessimistic and afraid.

The future is bright. She just doesn’t know it yet. Neither did we during the Cold War.