Does Natural Disaster Cause Trauma in Children?

Does Natural Disaster Cause Trauma in Children?
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Abstract
Natural disasters can have long lasting effects on a child. It can affect their school life, their physical health, and even their social life. This review looks at different ways through which natural disasters affect people, children in particular. There are some parts of the world that experience more natural disasters than others. It is hypothetically possible that people living in these areas may have developed a system to cope with the negative effects of natural disasters. Studying their way of life before, during, and after a disaster provides insights about how they live through such disasters. Haitians have strong family values and extend kinship to everyone. The family kind of orientation helps to psychologically and emotionally shield the children from the negative effects of natural disasters. Children in Haiti have developed a kind of resilience or tough-mindedness.
Keywords: Natural Disaster, Family, Children, Resilience.
Does Natural Disaster Cause Trauma in Children?
Introduction
A disaster is a potential event that is traumatic, collectively experienced, and has an acute onset that is time delimited (Kousky, 2016). A natural disaster comes in many forms, and its effects weigh heavily on all people across the board from the old to the young. The disasters destroy properties and interfere with the livelihood of people in the society. Studies have been done to show how these kinds of occurrences affect the older populations such as adolescents and working-class individuals (Rainbow et al., 2016). The disasters lead to closure of businesses, and people can no longer go to work. The implications are that basic services such as schools, health facilities, and water services are negatively affected and cannot be effectively utilized. When basic services stop running, it leads to further problems as diseases and hunger become a threat to the community. Children are especially vulnerable to such, as they rely heavily on the social structures in the society to grow and develop. When children are exposed to such kind of disasters, they can develop psychological and physical changes that could remain dormant only to manifest years later. There is, therefore, a need to establish ways of mitigating the implications of natural disasters on children’s lives. There are various social based approaches that have been noted to help children cope with the occurrence of natural disasters, and their analysis is vital as researchers continue to research on the issue and offer insights. Natural disasters such as earthquakes, tsunamis, and hurricanes among others, have an impact on children and researchers have not yet fully understood how children cope and the role of society in the post disaster times.
Social vulnerability and sociodemographic characteristics shape how children respond to natural disasters (Peek, Abramson, Cox, Fothergill, & Tobin, 2018). The role that institutions in the social-ecological context play in shaping children’s pre and post-disaster outcomes include resiliency and capacities. They are responsible for the wellbeing of children before a disaster, disaster recovery and evacuation initiatives in times of a disaster and subsequent measures and initiatives to ensure that children recover fully from the natural disasters. However, children’s voices, perspectives, and actions across the disaster life cycle should be considered. Their insights can offer researchers a better understanding of how they cope with the occurrence of natural disasters, which is vital in mitigating trauma disorders later in their lives.
A study by O’Grady (2018) resulted in the emergence of four resilience processes. These processes include sense-losing, improvising, remaking, and renewing. The fifth one, which did not appear, was the anticipating process. It would have appeared if the interview protocol had contained questions asking about survivors’ resources, beliefs, and practices prior to the earthquake. The themes that were most evident in characterizing sense-losing from the questions asked through the period of the study showed courage, acceptance, spiritual endurance, and social support. Those that characterized resilient improvising were creative imagination, spiritual identity, divine intervention, and collaborative coping. The themes that emerged as characterizing resilient sense-remaking were positive reappraisal, sense of purpose, spiritual devotion, and community outreach. Lastly, the themes that emerged as characterizing resilient renewing were new identity, increased courage, increased altruism, increased sense of community, increased strength, increased knowledge and increased faith.
According to O’Grady (2018), some participants did not exhibit post disaster resilience and growth, while others exhibited posttraumatic depreciation characterized by rigid losing sense, improvising, remaking and renewing. The study identifies what characterizes the resilient processes that survivors engage in to recover and move forward in the wake of disasters. It advances understanding of the role that religion and spirituality play in people’s post disaster resilience and advance cross-cultural understanding of post disaster resilience.
The themes that emerged suggest there are related yet distinct resilience processes that characterize people’s responses to a disaster. Results also supported the finding that most adults exhibit resilience in the face of adversity generally and disaster-related adversity specifically. Resilient survivors seemed to have engaged in adaptive forms of deliberate rumination such as increased life appreciation (such as a sense of purpose), greater personal strength (such as increased strength and increased courage), a stronger religious/ spiritual life (such as spiritual devotion, and increased faith), shifted priorities (such as community outreach and increased altruism), and better relationships (such as social support, increased sense of community).
In contrast, non-resilient survivors exhibited rigid psychological processes that seemed to contribute to their posttraumatic depreciation such as rigid sense-losing manifested as denial and disassociation (O’Grady, 2018).
Social science continues to be more marketable using a social vulnerability approach. This kind of approach distinctively links economical and historical causes of disaster to current hazardous condition in a bid to explain how a vulnerability will progress. Children have been identified as a susceptible population and will frequently appear in lists as first respondents when rapid needs are being assessed during disaster management. Social, geological and economic factors that put children in harm’s way are studied, and the effect of the harm in their life over short and long terms is determined. Short term implications include separation with family members, and long-term impacts are stress and depression that may influence the children later in adulthood.
Children are at the center of these studies, but the fact is that they do not exist on their own. They live in families and will most likely be found among groups of their peers, in schools, communities, and some even in the political arenas. The socio-ecological theory dictates that children be placed in a larger category involving the youth too. This kind of approach revealed the level of influence that institutions such as schools have in the lives of children before, during, and even after they face a natural disaster. A mother has been seen to be very key in assisting the children understand, prepare for, leave and also recover from a disaster.
A lot of research is currently being done to ...