A National Disaster

Helping Our Children and Ourselves

This article provides a summary of information that you might find useful as we address a national disaster affecting all of us. It includes information about disasters, some basic concepts for helping our children, and practical ideas to consider.

• Children take cues and comfort from parents and adults.
• Children will at different ages and points in their development have special issues.
• A child’s world is different from ours.
• First respond so that you understand- listen, and listen for the full question or issue that your child is struggling with.
• For children the most difficult thing is an unanswered question – in the absence of information they will supply their own.
• Children are observant of their world around them.
• Children are resilient.
• At times of trauma we are reacting normally to an abnormal life event - and that also applies to children.

• The younger the child the more they will rely on forms other than talk to express and react.
• Engage with your child at each level – thought, feeling and in actions.
• You are the expert in knowing your child.
• Help your child be able to express. Remember that the value comes not only in expression but doing so in a comforting relationship. We do not need words to get there.
• Recognize that expression is healthy. You may hear things you do not like. Be careful to show your child that their expression is accepted (the content may be something to talk further about).
• Children seek facts.
• Children seek the values and the context in which to deal with those facts.
• After you first engage to understand, can you then move to engaging to be understood? This is the place where you can offer adult guidance, support, comfort, and direction
• Take time- make this YOUR priority.
• Answer factual questions and focus on the question with honest and for your child’s world.
• Reassure, realistically.
• Let children help and become engaged in something they can be in control of.

• Will this happen to me, to us, or family, or town?
• Why did this bad thing happen?
• Will I be ok, will we be ok?
• Will life be ok again?
• Will this happen again?

Behind such questions are touchstone issues that go to the heart of the child’s world. The attachment lists out some of those touchstones.

We can do much to reassure that adults are working and working hard to deal with grown up issues. 

There are issues that can be applied to the child's world that can be mastered and redirected under their own control.

• For example, the importance of right and wrong, of how we treat each other, that bad things do happen and we work together at times to fix that bad thing.
• When bad things happen we talk about them share our thoughts so that we face them together.

• Help to re-establish a sense of adult control.
• Help to re-establish a sense of their immediate safety, security.
• We may make changes and they will be involved constructively in them.
• Pay attention to ways we can follow up and restate these messages in the little and sometimes subtle things we do in our daily lives with our children. (Reality comes not just in the big things, but in the little ones as well)
• Pay attention to our own actions.
• Help them return to a routine as soon as possible.
• Accept some temporary regression as normal.
• Help them shift thinking.
• Redirect energy to something constructive.
• Engage them in relationship.
• Pay attention to basics – good eating, sleeping where symptoms can be expressed.
• Paying attention to the little things, the subtle day to day things we do sends a big message.
• Allow children to be with other children.
• Support your child’s strengths.
• Support your child’s positive problem solving.
• Give concrete signs of safety, security, and predictability in your relationship.