How to Help Your Child Cope with Disastershock

How to Identify When Your Child is Stressed
How to Reassure Your Child
How to Use Art to Help Your Child Cope With Stress
How to Listen So Your Child Will Talk to You
How to Help Your Child to Relax: Ten Methods

How to Use Art to Help Your Child Cope With Stress

Figure 1. The Me Box

Art is a great way to help your child deal with disaster-related stress. This section describes a few simple art activities you can do right at home. The idea is to give your child the opportunity to gain back mastery by using your child's natural ability to create and be spontaneous. You're going to need some simple materials. For the first project, the "Me Box", (see Figure 1) you're going to need to scour the house for some old magazines, some glue and scissors, and find a box of any size that is particularly appealing to your child. It can be small or large. Round, oatmeal boxes are particularly fun for this project and you might have one lying around. Have the child sort through the magazines for pictures that represent the inside of themselves and for pictures that will represent feelings and experiences on the outside of themselves.

For example, wishes, or secrets and private thoughts or dreams may be put on the inside of the box. External things like places to go, pictures of things to do, or things that are particularly fun may be put on the outside of the box. Another aspect of this "Me Box" is to go on a treasure hunt to find things on the inside of the house and the outside of the house to add to the box. Photographs, pieces of fabric, or special trinkets that are particularly important to the child, may be put in the inside of the box. Things that you find on the outside of the house that are particular treasures in the garden or on the street and that may reflect ways the world around the child have changed may be added to the outside of the box. In this way your child creates what we call a "Me Box" that completely projects who your child is in his or her world.

		An extension of the "Me Box" idea is to put the inside images and outside images on a piece of folded paper (see Figure 2). An 18" by 14" padded paper that you can find in a local drugstore will be fine for this. Gluing images on to boxes or papers is particularly fun for kids at almost any age. Glitter, feather, ribbons, and other found decorative items can be added to embellish the box or paper collage project and make it truly special and expressive.
Figure 2. An alternative to the Me Box

Figure 3. Once Upon a Time Fairy Tale

If you have some drawing or painting materials around the house or you can get ahold of them easily, you might try the next project called "A Once Upon a Time Fairy Tale Drawing or Painting" (see Figure 3). Begin by having your child choose a special place for working, such as a table, and choose the art medium that he or she likes best. Tell your child that this art project is to be about a kingdom and suggest these following words. "Once upon a time, there was a kingdom where there was a hurricane (flood, earthquake, etc.) ... " and then let your child fill in the rest of the story by drawing or painting images of what your child thinks happened in this kingdom. Encourage your child to put animals and imagined or real characters in the drawing or painting.

Figure 4. Fantasy Kingdom

The picture does not have to be representational of the child's actual experience of the disaster. It provides, through fantasy, a safe way for your child to talk about his or her concerns. As this fantasy kingdom is created, you might suggest characters that you think could be helpful such as doctors or nurses, policemen or parents, or even fantasy characters who could be particularly helpful in the fantasy kingdom situation of a disaster (see Figure 4). Another constructive way to make pictures is by tearing up pieces of colored paper or magazines to build pictures by gluing them on to a piece of paper (see Figure 5). Simple shapes like circles or triangles can be used.

You can also make a 3-D Play Doe or paper maché sculpture of a guardian spirit or a protective character (see Figure 6).

3-Demensional Objects A paper maché sculpture may be made by using a balloon for the shape of the body. Blow up the balloon, tie it up, and simply put your newspaper strips dipped in the glue onto the balloon and in that way form the basic body. Later when the paper maché figure has dried, you can pop the balloon with a pin. You can build up the characters' shape and clothing (such as wings and capes and other details), and face, hands and paws by adding little pieces of tissue paper or little pieces of newspaper dipped in the glue. Fingers get very messy with this project and so does the table, so you will need to cover the whole work area with newspaper, and maybe have your child wear a smock.

Figure 5. Colored Paper Collage	Figure 6. 3-Dimensional Objects

The paper maché figure will need to dry overnight. After it's dry, your child will want to paint or decorate it so that it becomes truly your child's own. You might find that your child has turned the sculpture piece into a monster or a scary figure instead of a protective guardian figure. The process of transforming fears by making them through art materials or by playing them out is a natural coping mechanism of children experiencing stress. You might take this opportunity to encourage your child to seek an outlet to explore feelings and to stay safe at the same time by exploring the scary idea together and then by thinking of alternative comforting characters that maybe you enjoyed as a child. By making the comforting character in a 3-D sculpture or paper mache and decorating it, it can be kept in the child's room to chase away scary monsters or nightmares. It can become, in essence, a friend for the child.

Figure 7. Art Journal

Children are naturally curious about their worlds and you can work with your child to make an earthquake (flood, etc.) art journal that will contain the child's own special experience of the disaster (see Figure 7). The art journal can be made in an art pad with a spiral edge and could include sections with tabs for actual newspaper clippings, places where drawings or poems can be put in about ideas they have had about the disaster. Another section could include ways the world is being put back together in a positive direction. For instance, how people help each other and ideas that your child might have for ways that they can help their family or others. Another section of the art journal could be called "wishes". This could include drawings or lists of wishes that the child has for himself or herself, for the family, or for other people that your child has heard about or knows. Another section could be maps or safety routes of the house, of ways to stay safe and of plans that can be made to stay safe in situations such as a disaster.

Encouraging the child to decorate the outside of the cover for this art journal is important. Painting or drawing that conveys what it was like for them and that they are OK after the earthquake is important. Children need to know that they were successful and survivors in living through a disaster that affected us all. They need to be allowed to review their feeling of being a part of this part of history. The art journal is a way to let them express their feelings concerning the disaster while participating in a constructive art project that requires mastery. Working closely together on this project with your children can be comforting. In fact, the whole family could participate and it can be a family project.

We hope you'll find these suggestions useful and are sure that your children will elaborate on the ideas in their own unique and very creative ways. Art is a useful way not only to express feelings and to get them out, but also to transform them through uses of media in stress-reducing ways. Active participation in art helps put a temporal perspective on personal experience.

For example, a drawing about a disaster is something about an event that happened in the past and it allows us a chance to see in a concrete, visual way that, in fact, the stressful event is over. It allows children to go on to consider what life will be like for now and in the future. Allowing children to do the natural work of childhood by creating in art media, by building up and tearing down, by constructing and exploring, by interpreting with their hands and their eyes, permits them to express their physical and emotional world. Art is a great idea for anyone, and easy to do at home. And we suggest that it's a lot of fun!