Tell Your Kids the Truth About This Moment
The October 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake struck Northern California, where I then lived, shortly after I turned 11. It was not the biggest upheaval in my life that year—my parents’ marriage had just ended—but discovering that, on a random Tuesday afternoon, the ground could start shaking hard enough to knock you over was a pretty close second. In the days that followed, I was obsessed with news about the disaster, especially the deaths it had caused. For months afterward, to my older sister’s embarrassment, I kept a weird little archive of newspaper and magazine coverage.
Earlier this year, before COVID-19, before George Floyd’s murder, before our lives slowed down and the news cycle sped up, I started thinking about how children respond to crises. In The Atlantic’s May cover story, on rising rates of childhood anxiety disorders, I argued that even pre-pandemic, various facts of contemporary American life had turned 21st-century childhood into a petri dish for anxiety. By trying to protect our kids from all discomfort, researchers and clinicians repeatedly told me, parents were inadvertently preventing them from learning to tolerate the stresses and worries that are an inevitable part of life. And when people can’t tolerate their anxious feelings, a large body of research shows, those feelings are more apt to metastasize into lasting mental-health problems.
As I researched these issues, my earthquake memories drew me to the pediatrician W. Thomas Boyce’s study of Loma Prieta’s effects on local children. To better understand how they were coping after the disaster, Boyce in 1989 asked kids to “draw the earthquake”—and found that “kids who drew darker scenes tended to stay healthy in the weeks that followed, while those who drew sunny pictures were more likely to come down with infections and illnesses.” Today, Boyce says, he believes that children who reckoned with the disaster more directly and honestly ended up better off, because when we talk about the
