Playing to Heal: Working with Young Children in the Wake of Hurricane Helene
By Jessica Charles and Margaret Blachly
Natural disasters cause much more damage than fallen trees, broken water mains, and washed-out roads — they also batter our children’s emotional well-being.
Beyond the material necessities of life such as water, electricity, food, and shelter that Hurricane Helene has stripped from many families, it has taken away a sense of emotional safety. Our youngest children are profoundly affected by this type of disaster, which turns predictable routines inside out and thrusts children into situations they struggle to understand, but they can feel.
When babies and preschoolers live through natural disasters, their rapidly developing brains do not make sense of the events in the ways that adults’ brains do. Children have limited life experiences and information to help them understand what is happening, which can cause them to withdraw, act out, or blame themselves. When adults around them are full of worry, children can absorb adult anxiety while simultaneously experiencing their own.
Whether watching homes and trees crash down, hearing nonstop sirens and helicopters, or witnessing flood waters overtake their neighborhoods, young children’s brains can become triggered by a fear response that causes their nervous systems to remain on alert, long after the immediate disaster has passed.
There are, however, research-based ways of helping children through these events that are based on brain science and decades of practice with young children, including techniques that focus on creating opportunities for children to process their experiences through play with carefully selected materials and support from caring adults who understand child development and learning.
In the wake of Hurricane Helene, our colleague Gabriel Guyton, Co-Director of the Center for Emotionally Responsive Practice at Bank Street College, has been doing her best to put her skills as a mental health specialist and educator to use to help children and families in the area process what has just happened to them. An Asheville resident, Gabriel has set up a temporary playgroup to help children ages 0–5 process the grief, fear, and hopelessness that often accompany natural disasters.
With the help of her family, she turned her living room into a makeshift play space that is furnished with materials that will invite children to process through play. Providing items commonly seen and used in the disaster zone such as rain boots, water bottles, and pillows shaped like tree stumps for children enables them to act out recent experiences. Blocks and Magna-Tiles can be built into structures, knocked down, and then rebuilt to help children gain resilience. Books and songs that fit the moment, such as The Rabbit Listened and “The Itsy-Bitsy Spider” (who crawls up the water spout, is washed away when the rain comes down, and then climbs back up when the sun comes out) can help children make sense of all the flooding.
Such play spaces offer children space and time to acknowledge and process their hurricane experiences with others. Opportunities to talk to nurturing adults, draw pictures, and spend time connecting with other children who have experienced similar circumstances are foundational for emotional regulation. Introducing transitional objects like stuffed toys or teddy bears helps provide comfort and a sense of stability for children, even beyond the playgroup setting. Without these moments of connection, children can feel alone, emotionally isolated, and preoccupied with their traumatic experiences.
Crucially, the play itself becomes a space for healing. “It just looks like a little play space, but we are trying to be very intentional. A space like this can help children experience hard emotions like sadness, fear, and anger within a safe environment that also allows them to recreate new imaginative worlds and find places for hope,” she said.
Unfortunately, spaces such as the one Gabriel is creating for her neighbors are not systematically available to children living through natural disasters. The long-term impacts on mental health are significant, and children may need to process their experiences both in real time and for several years after the event is over and things have returned to a state of normalcy.
As the United States continues to face an increased probability — due to our changing climate — of natural disasters and pandemics like COVID-19, children from across the country will be affected. With proactive planning at the state and federal level, we can create spaces, materials, and playgroups like the one Gabriel has set up in her living room as a regular part of our emergency disaster response. These efforts require relatively modest investments, yet stand to offer some of the greatest yields we can make in communities that are coping with the trauma of natural disasters.
Jessica Charles is the Associate Dean for Research and Innovation at Bank Street Graduate School of Education. Margaret Blachly and Gabriel Guyton are Co-Directors of the Center for Emotionally Responsive Practice at Bank Street College.
