NASW Responds to Hurricane Katrina
Methods and Techniques Parents May Use to Help Their Children

from When Their Worlds Fall Apart

Parents who openly seek help after a disaster legitimize and model for their children the admission of a need for assistance (Hobfoll et al., 1991). Disaster relief professionals can help parents enhance their children's coping in a variety of ways. For example, they can give parents information about disaster-related stress, reduce their sense that they have to "have all the answers," and offer them information on available sources for help. These helpers can teach parents how to reassure their children without giving false assurance, how to encourage their children to ask questions and express their concerns, how to assure their children that their thoughts and feelings are not "bad," and how to mediate television news broadcasts by watching with their children and monitor­ing their responses. In addition, helpers should encourage parents to develop a fam­ily disaster plan in anticipation of a future disaster and to re-establish family rituals (Flynn & Nelson, 1998).

Disaster relief workers have found the concept of "parent as helper" to be very effective (Garbarino, Kostelny, & Dubrow, 1991). By delegating helping roles to par­ents, the helper empowers the family to work within its cultural, religious, and ethnic traditions to heal itself.

Interventions with parents that enlist them in the helping process are therapeutic and educational and, importantly, help parents develop the necessary attitude to help their children. Thus motivated, parents acquire a wide repertoire of specialized skills and prac­tices, interchangeably fulfilling the roles of mediator, supporter, and guide as different needs arise (Hobfoll et al., 1991;Terr, 1989). Recruiting parents as helpers means

• teaching them to use therapeutic strate­gies, such as relaxation exercises and cog­nitive-behavioral reinforcements (Meich­enbaum, 1985)
• training them to enhance their children's sense of control through guided imagery, make-believe, and metaphoric stories (Ayalon & Lahad, 1991)
• coaching them on how to get family members to make up stories together that break the vicious circle of fear, helpless­ness, and depression by constructing an empowering narrative from past memo­ries and positive future expectations (White & Epston, 1990)
• guiding them in planning time for exercis­ing the new techniques they learn
• instructing them to look for and under-stand their children 's stress symptoms and behavior, which also reduces the parents' anxiety, anger, and guilt and channels the motivation to overprotect their children into constructive actions (Hamblen, 2000)
• encouraging them to allow the traumat­ic event and trauma to be reconstructed according to each child's age, verbal capacity, and needs, which ensures that the family becomes the natural arena for sharing and processing grief over losses.