Dr. Clint Nowicke, a psychologist with Norton Children's spoke to LPM's Michelle Tyrene Johnson about how to handle children’s questions about the plane crash.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Michelle Tyrene Johnson: How should parents be talking to their children about this tragedy?
Clint Nowicke: There are developmentally appropriate ways to do so. Younger kids don't need to know all the graphic details. Older kids can know some of the details, but not necessarily all of the scary ones. What parents want to avoid doing is something called "cocooning," which is where not only are they forbidden from even reading about it or watching the news, but they're also shunned from even speaking about it. That makes the topic bigger and scarier than it needs to be. But like Mr. Rogers said, if it's mentionable, then it's manageable. So if kids are allowed to talk about what they're feeling, they're able to process it.
MTJ: And what about situations where, for example, like their kids who are really into airplanes, and so they hear that it's about an airplane, and so they want more information. How do you handle that?
CN: That does become a little bit harder because we do rely on flights for so much travel. Any way that a kid feels about it, positive or negative, there's no good or bad way of feeling about what happened. Every feeling that they have about it is a valid feeling. So if they're able to talk about it with their important grown-ups, whoever it might be, then they're able to manage how they feel in the moment,
With younger kids, because their world is very small, very limited, they might feel that everything is happening inside their world. So it feels a lot closer than it actually is, because their world is teeny tiny. Kids in general look to their important grown-ups for how to respond to a situation, but they also look to grown-ups to know how to cope with it. And so if adults are focused on ways that they are able to maintain a sense of control or stability, then that's going to help kids feel a lot safer.
MTJ: Are there behaviors or things that parents should be on the lookout for if their kids aren't verbalizing their concerns or their fears?
CN: That's especially important for younger kids, because they often don't have the vocabulary to talk about how they feel. For a lot of young kids, they talk about how they feel by how they play. So you might see them do some kind of concerning behaviors, like crash things into buildings that they make, throw planes and almost play out the experience. But that's really just them processing. The important thing is that the grown-ups are there to talk to them about what's going on.
