Consider This from NPR - Children Are Grieving. Here's How One Texas School District Is Trying to Help

Episode Date: December 5, 2022

It's been more than a year now since many kids across the country returned to their classrooms. And many of them brought grief and trauma with them, too.But some educators just don't feel equipped to support kids who are grieving.NPR's Rhitu Chatterjee speaks with a handful of school mental health professionals who recently attended a special training on grief and trauma.Also in this episode, NPR's Eric Deggans speaks with a psychologist on collective trauma in the wake of mass shootings.In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This message comes from Indiana University. Indiana University performs breakthrough research every year, making discoveries that improve human health, combat climate change, and move society forward. More at iu.edu forward. These past few years have brought about a lot of grief. This week, COVID-19 surpassed heart disease as the leading cause of death in the United States. We're going to begin this hour with news we hope that we would never have to report to you. The death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic has now reached one million Americans. And of course, it wasn't just about the pandemic.

Good afternoon, and we're coming on the air because of an awful scene playing out today in Texas. An active shooter for a time at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. Breaking news from Colorado, a deadly mass shooting overnight at a nightclub. More gun violence struck America over the weekend, this time in New Orleans and near downtown Atlanta. And kids, they're really feeling this. Schools across the country are seeing more and more students struggle with trauma and grief. I was seeing multiple students every single day who were at least acutely suicidal. And I've also noticed like crime, whether it's students being involved in like drugs, selling and using. I had a scholar who lost a grandparent and then they lost a brother to homicide and then they lost a friend to a car accident.

So many people have been lost to the pandemic and you can still feel that loss from people. They just are surviving. Monica Munoz, Christina McCray, Hector Soto and Diane Bippert are all school-based mental health care providers in Dallas. And they have been overwhelmed with all the grief their students are going through. Here is Beppert again. I was just recently in a second grade classroom and I said, has anyone else experienced any sort of death or loss? And about every child raised their hand and had a story about someone who close to them that had died. She says before the pandemic, if she'd asked preschoolers or elementary school kids that same question, they would say things like, I lost a tooth or I lost my puppy. But the pandemic has made many kids all too familiar with death. It's also meant that social workers and mental health workers are dealing with it more than they have before. Consider this. Children have returned to the classroom but are struggling to have some sense of normalcy in their lives, especially those who have recently lost loved ones. How can educators, who are facing the same challenges themselves, help their students?

From NPR, I'm Juana Summers. It's and C's apply. It's Consider This from NPR. It's been more than a year now since kids across the country returned to classrooms, and many of them brought grief and trauma with them too. But some educators just don't feel equipped to support kids who are grieving, which is why a school district in Dallas decided to send their mental health staff to a special training on grief and trauma. NPR's Ritu Chatterjee caught up with social workers and therapists who attended the training. Good morning, everybody. We're going to get started in two minutes. The people doing the training are from the Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute in Houston. Julie Kaplow directs the grief and trauma program there and has spent years researching the impact of grief on children.

So I know I'm dating myself here. Does anyone recognize this lady? Oh, thank God. So she is the Wendy's commercial lady. She used to be saying, where's the beef? She's now our mascot. She's saying, where's the grief? Kaplow says as a society, we don't talk about grief, despite how universal the experience is. It's the most distressing form of trauma among adults and youth. If you were to ask anybody, what is the hardest thing that's ever happened to you? The vast majority would say it was the death of my mother, my brother, my best friend. And yet, Kaplow knows that a lot of the folks in this room, even though they are social workers and therapists, don't know much about what grief looks like in children, how it affects them, how it plays out over time. Children's grief is not a mini-me

version of adult grief. The way that children grieve looks very different than how adults grieve. She tells them that no two kids grieve the same way. Some obsess about how their loved one died. Others have fantasies of being reunited with them, which puts them at a higher risk of suicide. Some struggle with existential pain. But often kids don't have the words to understand or express what they're going through, so it shows up in their behaviors. They act out, become hypervigilant, struggle to focus. Kaplow says about 10 to 20 percent of kids are at risk of developing prolonged grief disorder, which keeps them stuck in grief. And those who've lost a parent or caregiver are at a greater risk of all kinds of long-term problems.

At school, in their relationships, and are more likely to develop symptoms of mental illness, including PTSD. And the pandemic, she says, has put many more kids at risk of these complications. The last numbers I saw, we have about 290,000 U.S. youth who've experienced the death of a caregiver due to COVID. And Latino and African-American kids, that's the vast majority of students at the Dallas Independent School District, have been disproportionately affected by these deaths. The pandemic has also exacerbated other traumas and stress in their lives. More families have lost income, more lives lost to gun violence, car accidents, and other causes. Kablo's colleague Marissa Navits introduces an intervention designed to

help kids heal from grief and trauma. It's been around for many, many years. It's been used after the war in Bosnia. It's been used after Columbine. Navits says the treatment works well in the school setting and starts with teaching kids the words to understand grief. We want to describe grief reactions in kids speak, help the kids get broader vocabularies for labeling their grief reactions, explain how they may change over time, explain the purpose of grief and mourning. Her colleague Stacey Britton talks about using the feelings thermometer. It's a colored chart showing different emotions that's included in a thick manual given to every participant. We're going to start using that every session for check-in. How are you feeling? Rate the level, the intensity of the emotion or emotions that you're feeling this day.

The participants then practice this in breakout groups. Frustrated, calm, happy. Cover that emotion that you're feeling the most right now. And this paves the way for therapists to teach kids healthy ways to cope with their pain so they don't turn to self-harm or drugs or violence. The next day, Kaplow shares tools to use with kids in more complicated circumstances. So many of the kids that we work with have what we call ambivalent losses. This might have been a person who they may not have had the most healthy relationship with, but they're still grieving. She says these ambivalent losses often confuse and distress children, and a simple

exercise can help. This exercise is designed to help with acceptance of negative traits or behaviors of the person who died while holding on to more of those positive memories. As she speaks, her colleagues give each group a big plastic bowl, a jar of water, and a handful of stones and popsicle sticks. When we do this exercise, we have each child, adolescent, write down on two of their stones two negative traits or behaviors of the person who died. Popsicle sticks, we want the kids to write down two positive traits or behaviors. Then they'll throw the sticks and stones in the bowl before pouring the water in. We pour the water in.

The stones remain on the bottom. And you can go to town with the metaphors here. And let the positive rise. As the participants practice this, many, like therapist Mika Johnson, talk about people they've lost. My cousin who lived a dangerous life and he wouldn't change, but I could tell that he loved his family. Later, sitting outside, Johnson tells me that working with grieving clients used to make her anxious. She felt ill-equipped, and it didn't help that like many of her colleagues, she too has recently lost loved ones. I lost three relatives

back to back to back. One died from COVID, and one was gun violence violence and the other one was diabetes. Three different traumatic experiences for me. But she barely had a chance to grieve until this workshop. To be able to process that and still help others through their healing has been life-changing for me. I think will make me an even more powerful therapist. That's the power in talking about grief, says Julie Kaplow. One of my mentors used to say, you need to feel it to heal it. And with all the debts and other losses kids have endured in recent years, she says we must get better at helping kids grieve. And what I mean by that is acknowledging that kids have experienced significant losses,

that children grieve just as much as adults do, and that by addressing it, naming it, bearing witness to it, we can actually produce a lot of healing. NPR's Ritu Chatterjee's reporting for this story was supported by the Dart Center on Trauma and Journalism. Guns are a huge source of trauma for many Americans. Tens of thousands of people are personally touched by gun violence every year, and through media coverage, we're all

reminded every day of the violence that could reach us, even if statistically the possibility remains incredibly low. That fear builds up into what many experts call a collective or secondary trauma, one most of us are not equipped to deal with on our own. My colleague Eric Deggans recently spoke with Manuel Zamarripa. He's a psychologist and an expert on dealing with secondary trauma, and also the co-director and co-founder of the Institute of Chicana Chicano Psychology based in Austin, Texas. So these recent shootings at a Walmart in Virginia and the Q9 Club in Colorado, they've already been covered massively by news media, and it's had a

huge impact on the public. Why do you think so many people feel tied emotionally and psychologically to a tragedy they might not be directly connected to? Well, I think that one of the wonderful things about people is our ability to empathize. And I think a lot of the times we can see ourselves in these tragedies. We see a lot of families, we see a lot of everyday people going into places that are typically safe, the places that a lot of us go into and when these tragedies occur that are so out of the norm and we hear about them so often, it can have that impact where our basic sense of safety sometimes can be questioned, if not threatened. And we begin to see ourselves in these tragedies. And I think that is one of the things that leads to what we call secondary trauma.

You've advised people to check their emotional bandwidth before engaging in conversations about subjects like this. What do you mean by that? Yes, I think that one of the things we try to do when these tragedies impact us is we try to cope. And in trying to cope, the most important thing is being able to connect with other people that are supportive, with other people that can also bring us comfort to reach out. Because if we continue to take in that same information over and over, our ability to cope becomes overwhelmed. And then that can lead to more sustained symptoms. It can come up physically, headaches, stomach aches. It can come out emotionally. Sometimes we may not be as patient to our kids, our family, our

relationships, or we may disconnect from relationships and people that typically we have good connections with. So the more we become overwhelmed, the more our coping also becomes overwhelmed. And so we need to check how much of this information we can take in. I was just wondering, this is going to happen again. People are going to have to cope with this again. What should people do to prepare themselves emotionally when news of the next mass shooting hits the news media? We're all going to grieve differently and we're all going to be affected differently. But to prepare, we should keep those connections that we have, those healthy relations that we have. We should keep those close to our heart. We should continue

to feed those really important, healthy interactions, that circle that we have, that support system. And even, you know, if we are not used to it, maybe reaching out to a mental health professional or start looking into what that might look like for us. That was Manuel Zamarripa speaking to my colleague, Eric Deggans. Zamarripa co-directs the Institute of Chicana Chicano Psychology based in Austin, Texas. It's Consideravous from NPR. I'm Juana Summers.