Helping Children Cope with Crisis: Just for Parents

Identify signs of stress in your child

The activities in this book are designed to encourage communication and help you to make your child feel safe in challenging times. Even when parents are protective, caring, and sensitive, children may need extra help to cope with a crisis. Different children have different needs. Children with the same experience may respond in different ways. Pay attention to changes in the way your child looks or behaves. There are times when changes in behavior mean your child needs extra help from a health care professional.

Create healthy ways for your child to express emotions, such as the activities described in this book. Let your child see you using healthy ways to express emotions.

The following changes or behaviors may be signs of a problem:

• Clinging behavior
• Fears that won’t go away
• Nightmares
• Bedwetting
• Difficulty paying attention
• Jumpy, edgy
• Behavior problems in school
• Headaches, stomachaches, or dizziness for no known reason
• Sad or less active
• Always talking about or acting out a disaster
• Irritability
• Changes in eating behavior
• Decrease in academic performance

Children may show one of these behaviors, or many of them; they may do them just a little, or all the time. It’s important that you talk to a health care provider, teacher, school counselor, or mental health professional if you see any of these behaviors. These people can help figure out whether your child’s reactions are nothing to worry about, or if your child needs some special attention or care.

Prevent problems before they arise

Prevention is more than just saying "no" or "stop." Prevention has two parts: 1) Spotting trouble before it becomes a problem; and 2) Knowing how to work through a problem once it happens. To learn more, look at each one a little closer.

Spotting Trouble

Consider these ways to spot trouble before it turns into a full-blown problem:

• Be active in your child’s life. This is important for all parents, even if your child only lives with you part of the time. By knowing how your child usually thinks, feels, and acts, you can see when things start to change. Some changes are part of your child’s growing up, but others could be signs of trouble.
• Set limits that everyone can live with and follow up with them consistently. Put limits only on things that are most important to you. Make sure you and your child can “see” a limit clearly. If your child goes beyond the limit, deal with her in the same way when the situation is the same. If you decide to punish her, use the most effective methods, like restriction or timeouts. You could also make your child make up for or fix the result of her actions. Make sure the punishment fits your child’s “crime.” As your child learns how limits work and what happens when she goes over the limit, she’ll trust you to be fair.
• Create healthy ways for your child to express emotions. Many children act out when they don’t know how to handle their emotions. Feelings can be so strong that normal ways of letting them out don’t work. Or, because feelings like anger or sadness are sometimes seen as “bad,” your child may not want to be angry or sad in front of others. Help your child learn that it’s OK to say or show how she feels in healthy, positive ways, like the activities outlined in this book. Do these things yourself to deal with your own feelings. When the strong feelings have passed or are less powerful, talk to your child about how she feels and why she feels that way. Make sure your child knows that all her feelings are part of who she is, even the “bad” ones. Once your child knows her range of feelings, she can start to learn how to handle them.

Knowing How to Work Through a Problem When It Happens

Different problems need different solutions. To solve tough problems, you may need more complex methods. Keep these things in mind when trying to work through a problem: