1P-SS1-03

 

 

IMPACT OF CRISES ON CHILD DEVELOPMENT

Leavitt LA1

1 University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin, USA

 

Objective:  This presentation summarizes how a child’s developmental level and experience determine the psychological effect of the disaster.  It suggests a developmentally based approach to interventions.

Background:  Every year millions of children are the victims of natural and manmade disasters.    In recent years there have been several dozen armed conflicts around the world at any given time, creating war zones where a large number of victims are children.  Children represent a significant percentage of war and disaster refugees who must live under conditions of great physical and psychological stress. Surprisingly, despite the great number of children affected, efforts to understand and ameliorate the psychological effects of disaster on children were limited until recently.  Research has investigated the patterns of social and moral development in children, as well as children’s changing understanding of ordinary events in their daily lives, but what are the psychological effects of disaster on a 3-year-old child and how do they differ from the effects on a 10-year-old?  What do children understand about their world when that environment is filled with chaos and violence?  What happens to the development of the moral self and to the child’s developing social competencies?  Although it appears obvious that exposure to disasters and violence cannot be good for children, it is imperative that we understand exactly what the short- and long-term behavioral effects are and what developmental mechanisms are affected.

Discussion:  Research in the behavioral sciences has begun to confront the problems of children exposed to disasters and violence.  Two general goals are apparent in this effort.  The first is to understand the immediate psychological and physical effects so that public health intervention can deal with the acute and, if left untreated, chronic effects of exposure.  The second is to understand the broader psychological context within which disasters are perceived and interpreted by children. Recent work by clinicians and researchers has demonstrated the widespread and often long-term effects of disasters on the psychological well-being of children.  This work has revised past clinical understanding that children recover quickly and completely from exposure to natural and manmade disasters.  It lends urgency to the need to develop wide-ranging public mental health measures in response to the profound exposure to disasters that children around the world experience.