Local psychologist does not know the answer

I have always argued that professionals should acknowledge more often that they don’t have the answers. Here I go. I don’t have the answer. 

In the last two days, I have had three parents tell me that their children — in these cases elementary-age and younger adolescents — are experiencing marked anxiety about world events. These parents mentioned two matters in the recent news, the rise of ISIS and the current West African outbreak of Ebola, including the appearance, at this writing, of a confirmed case and a fatality in the United States. These parents want to know how to soothe their children, and I don’t have a satisfying answer.

Sometimes children worry about completely unrealistic things. There are no monsters under the bed, at least not literally. Sometimes they worry about precisely the same things we worry about as adults, just in different ways. So, how do we answer our children’s anxious questions about the world? Will terrorists come here? Will I get Ebola? Will a tornado destroy our home and carry us away?

Should we provide more information? Or maybe less information? I’m not sure. Sometimes in the absence of information, people, including children, imagine things are worse than they are. They make up things to fill in the gaps in knowledge. So, an argument can be made for providing more information. At the same time, one wonders if the problem is too much information, particularly information being spun by media outlets. I’m pretty sure I don’t want to see children getting their information from TV, especially not when CNN does nearly around-the-clock coverage of the first single case of Ebola with the tag “Ebola in America,” and not when a Fox News ex-Survivor contestant — now somehow qualified to interview infectious disease experts on television — practically begs the doctors to panic.

And what are we to say to children to calm their fears about ISIS? How are we to explain how people get to the point in life that they imagine it is somehow permissible to slaughter aid workers and journalists and produce a slick video to celebrate? How do we handle this question from a 7-year-old: “What’s decapitation?”

In Alabama, we’re never much removed from the devastation of tornados. We’re never more than a couple of years or maybe one county over. How do we respond to a child’s fear that a tornado will destroy her home? We can say it won’t happen, but we know we can’t be sure. Probably our children know we can’t be sure. We can say it is unlikely, but odds don’t mean much to children. 

I don’t know enough about what to say to children about these things. It just reminds me we have all the more reason to spend a lot of time playing with them and just hanging out with them. It is a good time, as always, to model for them calm and not panic. Since we don’t know what to say to some questions, let us spend more time saying other things to children, things we do know how to say. Let’s say things like “I love you very much,” “I really enjoy being with you,” “You are a nice person and a smart one, too,” and “I will always do all I can to keep you safe.” 

Psychologist Dale Wisely is the director of student services for Mountain Brook Schools.