| Communicating Chaos |
| Written by Joseph Frost |
 From Edition 1 – August 2007 It’s raining, the water’s rising and so are your anxiety levels. The kids seems amused, ambivalent to the impending disaster outside. The flood waters are under the door and ebbing into the house. The kids begin to panic and look to you for guidance as you ask yourself the obvious question - “What am I going to tell them?” Explaining natural disasters to your children can often be as hard as the old adage, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” It can even be more difficult than fielding the old chestnut, “Where did I come from?” Wayne Clarke is a Senior Clinical Psychologist for Kaleidoscope, the Hunter Children’s Health Network. In the aftermath of the floods, Mr. Clarke believes that the best thing parents can do for their children is to help them manage their anxiety levels. “Anxiety is just an emotion that is about preparation, being ready for something. But you can’t sustain that readiness for long. The thing has to happen and then the anxiety has done its job, subsiding when the situation has been resolved. When it isn’t being resolved it can be difficult for anybody, let alone children.” After experiencing the recent floods and storms, anxiety levels for many people were high for extended periods of time. For children in particular, anxiety levels can stay at a heightened level for days. “Sometimes, after the actual event has passed, children’s vigilance for it happening again will be on the increase. For example, when children have been scared by a thunderstorm, simply seeing a cloudy sky will be frightening for them because they will anticipate that another such thunderstorm is going to occur again. Children will also sometimes actually re-experience things. So if they were in a very frightening situation, either in their dreams or their imagination, they have flashbacks at any point in the day.” In a paper Mr Clarke wrote in 1995, he noted that heightened vigilance was one of many common reactions to an abnormal event such as a storm. Some other common reactions from children included a regression in their behaviour, such as becoming clingy to their parents and finding it difficult to sleep. “Children may have disturbances in the general rhythms of their life. Eating and sleeping are the rhythms, the anchor points, of our lives. You may find that kids’ ability to sleep and their willingness to eat also wanes.” While these will all be temporary reactions, Mr Clarke says parents can help minimise their children’s anxiety by managing their own. “The younger the child, the more the information about their own anxiety will be geared around what’s happening to their parents. So, if parents are anxious, distressed or not available for any period of time, kids are much more likely to be worried.” It is also worth remembering for while things may be tough for adults financially speaking, these are hardships that their children really should not have to bear. “You don’t give children too many details –they shouldn’t need to hear things that they don’t need to know, things in the grown-up world.” Clarke advises. “Try to keep at bay things that really are not kids’ business.” Of course, once the initial danger has passed and anxiety levels have returned to normal, there is the reality of life after the storm to live with. For many families, life after the storm will be completely different as the family house may be uninhabitable for months, or may even have to be demolished. Mr Clarke believes that the best way for parents to help their children to face these new challenges is to give them a routine. “If you are in a different environment, like Grandma’s or even a motel, it’s not going to be easy but to try to establish a routine. Bedtime is still 8:30, even though we are at Grandma’s or we’re in the rented house, it’s still the routine, it’s what we do, we’re just doing it in a different circumstance. It’s what kids need.” |