Earth & Sky

Restoring routines helps kids cope with disaster

Lori Peek talks about Hurricane Katrina’s impact on children.

When Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast in August 2005, hundreds of thousands of people – including many children – were displaced from their homes. Lori Peek received a flash grant from the Natural Hazards Center in Boulder, Colorado to travel to Louisiana and interview parents, teachers and other adults about how the displacement has affected the children in their lives. She wanted to understand what things adults – and the children themselves – did to lessen the impacts on children. Dr. Peek spoke with Earth & Sky’s Marc Airhart about her study, conducted three weeks after Katrina.

Airhart: What are some of the ways that kids were affected by Katrina and the displacement? I suppose there are the obvious things like losing toys and books.

Peek: Well, as you said, there were the obvious things that they lost that were very important to them, such as their pictures and their trophies and school awards and things like that. Some of them even said, “My video game was the most important thing to me and I lost my video game player.”

But beyond the material possessions, I think one of the things that was most difficult for children was losing their sense of routine.

The parents said that at first, the kids – especially the younger, elementary school age–kids – were very much viewing this as an extended vacation. They were so excited that they didn’t have to go to school. But within days, they started to realize and grasp, ‘hmm, we’re not going home for a really long time. I don’t know where my friends are, and I really love my fourth grade teacher and I won’t get to see my teacher anymore.’ When those sorts of things started to kick in for the children, it was losing their sense of normalcy and routine that, I think, was the most important thing that they lost.

Losing friends was really big for all of the children. For high schoolers in particular, it was really difficult. Some of them were looking forward to their senior prom. Some of them had been separated from people they were dating. At that stage in life, those sorts of things are really big.

Airhart: What kinds of things did children, and the adults around them, do that lessened the impacts of Katrina and the displacement?

Peek: Some of the younger children were doing things like keeping journals and drawing pictures. Some even created games around the disaster. One parent told us about this evacuation game that her children played. They ran around the house and threw things in a garbage bag, and timed themselves to see how quickly they could gather up their most precious possessions.

Some of this was also initiated by teachers who were concerned about the children having an outlet to express their fears, concerns or worries. Some of these teachers we talked to put into place a journaling project, asking the children to write about how they were coping and feeling, or asking children to do word association games where they would put up a photograph of something related to the hurricane and then the children would come up with words.

The parents also felt that these were really effective means to help their children cope, and to come to terms with the fact that “you may never see you best friend again or you may never get to go back to your same schoolhouse, but this is what our life and our routine is going to look like for the time being.”

Some of the families were trying to get their children to help out around the house, with the overarching theme of getting routine back into their lives. At first, they were having to eat carryout junk food and things like that. But the parents really quickly tried to get their children back into the routine of doing their chores, even if they were living in a friend’s home – which most of them were at the time – or in a shelter. They made the children get up and go to school and do these sort of things that make up our typical everyday lives, even following such a catastrophic disaster.

Airhart: What about children living in shelters? Were there some specific things that helped them?

Peek: In the shelters, the Red Cross and other community volunteers put into place things to try to help the parents, especially the parents of very young children – like drop–off play areas, where, for two hours a day, you could leave your child under supervision of trained volunteers. And then the parents could go do things like take a nap, take a shower or go stand in line to get disaster aid. We were very pleased that the shelter workers had thought to do that, to give mothers and fathers of the youngest children opportunities to deal with their lives. And they had things for adolescents and teenagers. They organized basketball games and helped them find schools in the area, giving them places to do their homework and so on.

For people living in these mass shelter situations, the upheaval that this threw into their lives made establishing a sense of routine even more difficult.

One problem with the shelters was they didn’t provide alarm clocks. And so, some of the parents reported that their kids were missing school. If they had a cell phone, they could set the alarm on their cell phone, but many didn’t have that option. You take for granted that you have an alarm clock to get yourself up in the morning, but in the shelters, some of the people had to find alternative means to wake up in the morning to get the children off to school.

As anyone who has children knows, getting your kids ready for school is a major undertaking. Think about how difficult that would be when you’re living with literally thousands of other people in the case of these mass shelters.

Airhart: Who did you talk to during your study?

Peek: What we’re specifically looking at of course is children’s experiences in the disaster. But unfortunately, because of various human subject regulations, we could not get approval to talk to the children themselves in this short of a time frame.

So, instead, we talked to the adults in these children’s lives. Specifically, we talked to parents, both mothers and fathers from both single and double parent families. We talked to grandparents. We talked to high school coaches, elementary and high school teachers, high school and grade school principals. And then we talked to a lot of emergency disaster relief workers – including mental health workers and shelter coordinators. And then we also talked to day care service providers. We tried to get a wide sample of people who have worked with children of various ages as well as with the parents of children of course.

Airhart: What was it like talking to parents and others who had actually been through this disaster?

Peek: Many of the people we talked to had already been through many hurricanes before. The 2004 hurricane season was a very active season. So, they had evacuated time after time, they had loaded up the vehicles with all the family photo albums and so forth.

So, by the time Katrina came, many of these families just threw one change of clothes into the car and were thinking, here we go again, we’ll be back within two days. And then when that didn’t happen and they just realized exactly how much danger they had been in and how much they had lost – some of them lost their entire home, others lost one level of their house or so forth – it was quite an emotional experience to hear about this.

Many of the parents said that if they wouldn’t have had children, they wouldn’t have evacuated for this storm. But because of their kids, they did decide to go ahead and evacuate, so they were very thankful for that.

But even within that, the parents had very different experiences. For the parents and their children who had evacuated prior to the storm and who had a car to leave with or were able to stay with friends or family members, it was a very different experience than for some of the mothers and fathers who did not evacuate.

One mother we talked to ended up having to steal a truck – hot wire a truck – so that she and her four children could get out of the city of New Orleans. Another mother we talked to had to strap her newborn baby to herself with a blanket so they could get out. Those mothers had a very different level of trauma because they didn’t get out before the storm. So they were very concerned that their children could have lost their lives in this disaster.

Airhart: How did this work affect you?

Peek: It’s very difficult to do this sort of research because you’re walking into people’s lives and you’re asking them to tell you about what may have been one of the most traumatic or devastating events that’s in their entire lives and you’re asking them to relive that. That takes a toll on you.

But at the same time, most people that we interviewed afterward said, thank you so much, I appreciate someone listening to my story. I think that’s a good thing and hopefully it does provide a positive function for the people who are telling their stories.

It’s hard to walk into somebody’s life who has lost everything. And you know that you have a plane ticket back out of the disaster zone. You can leave and you can go back to your life and they’re left there with literally nothing. Yeah, it is difficult. But I think the way you cope with that is that you always try to stay at the center of your scholarship, remembering that you’re trying to give something back to the community through offering applied recommendations that policy makers can use.