Kids dealing with natural disaster.

With all the natural disasters that Australia has faced in the past couple of months I was hoping someone might have some advice about helping my 3.5 year old deal with the Christchurch Earthquake.

When it happened we told him there had been a quake and that some buildings have fallen down. I didn't mention that lives were lost. But over the week after the quake he has seen the odd bit on telly and overheard conversations, it is natural for people to talk about something like that. On Tuesday at kindy we observed the national 2 minutes of silence and I told him then that a few people had died in the quake and it was to remember them.

So today he kept popping out with things like "if I were in Christchurch I would....run really fast and get all the people out/tell the people to run faster/get a trailer and load up all the bricks so people can get out" etc
It seems that he is feeling the same sense of helplessness that the rest of NZ is feeling, of wanting to fix it and to help those lost.

Is there anything I should be doing to help him? Or do I just let it settle over time. I know he dwells on these things - our dog died on Boxing day and he still says something about it nearly every day (more since he heard about this).

Does anyone have any tips of what they told their children that helped them deal with these events?

No advice but wanted to give you (and your gorgeous DS) one of these :hug:

We had an ad on the radio here not long after the floods that said the best thing to do was to acknowledge the children's feelings and let them know it's okay to feel that way. It's how they come to understand life I guess... sorry it's not much help but thought I'd share what I heard

I think if he wants to talk about it let him, listen to him and discuss certain things about it with him. It's probably his way of processing it. Might be a good idea to help him with your own emergency plan (if you think it would be a good idea)?

DS is younger, but DH has been sitting him down showing the pictures of the earthquake and talking about buildings falling down and people being rescued (DH's family are in CHCH btw).
I'm not sure how much he really understands, but I was a but unnerved by his role-play games with big buildings being damaged and him driving a drigger truck to rescue people. He talks about things being dead sometimes, but it's still just a word to him I think.
I'm really not sure what the best way to deal with it is - I guess being open and honest is right?

They are so sensitive at this age aren't they Arte? Lulu wasn't anywhere near the floods, but saw a bit of footage on TV, she talked about the floods and water all the time. She was scared in the beginning, but we talked about it a lot and she is better now. We are flying to QLD tomorrow and the first thing she said when i told her today was 'But what about the floods mummy, they might wash us away'. I thought she'd forgotten all about it. Again we talked about it and she's feeling good about going now.

Like the other girls have said, listening and validating his feelings is important. He's no dummy, so i think he'd benefit from honest answers to his questions. Poor little dude.

I have let DD1 watch a bit of all the disasters on TV and talked to her about them because I figure that I can't stop her from seeing media footage of it, so I expose her to it and talk to her about it. I think if she understands that I know about it, and I tell her that it is sad and she has seen me cry about it, she can deal with it.

After we talk about the disaster, I have spent a lot of time talking to her about how people help each other in a disaster. There are also a lot of media images of this with all of the disaster so we have looked at those pictures as well and talked about all the different things that people do to help each other. She was quite freaked out by some of the flood images of Toowoomba and the cars floating down the street and I acknowledge that it was scary and very sad for people but when the water goes away, people help each other.

When they announced that Brisbane was going to flood, I told her what was going to happen and we talked about how people get ready for floods. We looked at some of the pictures of the rain on the BOM website of the rainfall - which she liked though I don't think she understood. I think she liked that there was lots of information around. When the pictures of the flood from Brisbane came on the TV, DD1 said to me 'Look Mummy. That's what you told me about. Daddy, Mummy told me about this.' I think it gave her a lot of comfort that I knew what was happening and that the people were safe. We also talked again about how people were helping each other and how we could help the people in the floods.

Then the cyclone warnings started here. I tried to prepare her for the parts that I thought were scariest - the noise, the wind and that we might lose our power for a few days. She was worried about our house blowing away and I told her that our house was made for cyclones and that we were safe. I talked to her about the possibility of the house getting damaged though and she helped me prepare some places around our house we could go if our house did get damaged. I didn't want to stress her out too much so I didn't say that our roof might blow off. We also talked about how people would come and help us after the cyclone if we needed it and our house didn't matter too much, we were all going to stay safe because we had lots of plans. We looked at the BOM website and watched the cyclone come closer and closer - she liked this too because it meant we knew what was happening.

When our power went out, she was fine with it because I had given her a torch which she was super excited about using. She watched the wind out the window with us for a while and then went to bed in our bed with us. She slept the rest of the night. When we could finally leave our house, I prepared her for what she might see out of the car window - trees blown over, houses damaged and powerlines down. She was really stressed out by all the tress that had blown over. We spent some time watching the army and council workers do some cleaning up. It helped.

The Earthquake has been more tricky. We have a book that she has been obsessed with for the last few months called Earthquakes. It was a book I had from when I was a teacher and I put all my books from school down onto her reading shelf once she stopped damaging paper books while trying to read them. I should have looked through them first, but didn't so she found this book and has wanted to read it at bedtime every night for a few months. The book goes through the history of Earthquakes with cartoon pictures of what happens, why they happen and does talk about people dying in Earthquakes. The end of the book focuses on how people are working to make buildings that withstand Earthquakes and how it is all a lot safer - she took a lot of comfort in this.

When the Earthquakes came onto TV last week, she knew exactly what it was straight away and asked me directly if people died. I told her the truth and said it was very very sad for their families. Then we looked at pictures of people helping other people out of buildings and comforting each other and spent a lot of time talking about it. I turned it off after 10 mins because I do think the images were very intense. She has coped quite well with the Earthquake stuff and again we have focused on the clean up and people helping each other.

I think that by talking about how everything starts going back to normal and how people help each other (and how we can help - we pray, send money etc and let her be a part of that) it is letting her feel like there is some control in the situation. Usually, there is nothing that you can do about a disaster which is why I think we all feel so helpless, but there is lots to be done afterwards and the compassion that people show for each other is a really beautiful thing. I think it is good for kids to see how much people help each other out.

We also talk about how the scientists learn from disasters and try to make sure that next time they are more ready. They build buildings differently to help them last through a disaster because they want to keep everyone as safe as possible. We talk about what we can do to protect ourselves from a disaster because that is something that we also have control over.

DD1 did act funny for a while after the cyclone - she was very unsettled. She drew pictures of trees blowing over and acted a little bit silly at different times too (talking in jibberish and virtually bouncing off the walls). I asked her about her pictures when she drew them and let her talk. I didn't say much beyond "It's very sad all the trees blew over" and when she did the other behaviours, we tried different things to calm her down - sometimes a cuddle in Mummy and Daddy's bed, sometimes a drive in the car, sometimes a DVD (there was no way to talk to her about it at those points but I did feel that I needed to calm her down and giving her something to do worked).