as a source of harm for children’s mental health. But there’s another risk factor that’s going unnoticed. We need to talk about what climate change means for children’s mental health.,” children born today will experience two to seven times as many weather-related disasters as their grandparents. And that’s a minimum. This alarming figure assumes children grow up in a world where countries uphold their climate pledges.
Many adults don’t realize disasters can affect children’s mental health in profound and long-term ways. After , I was part of a team that surveyed nearly 300 elementary school students who lived in the path of the storm. Most adults told us children had “bounced back.”Eight months after the storm, 33 percent reported elevated symptoms of posttraumatic stress and/or depression. “Elevated” means symptoms severe enough that they may need clinical intervention. For children, those symptoms can look like nightmares or flashbacks, difficulty sleeping or avoiding reminders of the disaster.
Distressed children often don’t recover on their own. They suffer. During our Hurricane Ike assessments, one child broke down crying when we asked if they were experiencing symptoms. They were relieved someone had “finally asked” how they were doing. They didn’t know that distress can be a typical reaction to disasters. They hadn’t talked to an adult because they didn’t want to worry people — especially people who were already stressed by the disaster.