Bill Corbett

When preschoolers and younger school aged children see images of or experience disasters and large scale storms, it can really frighten them. They live in a world somewhere between reality and fantasy and often have difficulty telling the difference between the two. They also have not yet developed their full understanding of mortality or whether something on television is far away or close by. I was asked this same question following the Columbine school shooting in 1999, the World Trade Center attack in 2001, and the Tsunami or 2005. Here are some guidelines for raising children when something bad happens in the world. Limit their exposure to televised news reports on the occurrence. This is a good time to fall back on effectively managing their access to the television by limiting the amount of time they watch it. If you have to watch it yourself, coordinate it so that they are involved in another activity at that time. There are numerous university studies that reveal the high a...