Techniques to address anxiety in kids, post-Helene

The Tingleys rode out Tropical Storm Helene like many families in Western North Carolina. They sheltered in their house in North Asheville with their children, listening as trees fell around them. When the storm passed, they ventured outside to explore the damage. Thankfully, neither they nor their property were harmed.

The days following Helene were full of unknowns for the family. Brett and Elizabeth Tingley temporarily evacuated their kids, 10-year-old son, Lytton, and 7-year-old daughter, Jewel, to South Carolina and tried to encourage play. But the children picked up on their parents’ panic. With phones and internet down from the storm, the Tingleys had no way to confirm Brett’s parents’ safety for three or four days. 

Then the Tingleys received devastating news about the family of their close friend Lance Wisely. Helene’s flooding killed Lance’s former partner, Alison Wisely, as well as her fiancé, Knox Petrucci, and the Wisely children, Felix, 9, and Lucas, 7. Felix and Lucas were lifelong friends with Lytton and Jewel. 

“I think that is when it really started hitting the kids the most because they saw us break down,” says Elizabeth. The Tingleys attended their friends’ funeral as a family, which they sense is when the finality of their friends’ deaths fully sunk in for the children. “The funeral was really hard on them,” says Brett.

In the aftermath of Helene and since losing their friends, the Tingleys see anxiety in their children that heretofore didn’t exist. 

“I have noticed with Jewel, our 7-year-old, she has started expressing anxiety over different kinds of disasters that could happen,” says Elizabeth. “Like the other night, she suddenly got worried and fixated that the house was going to burn down.” The couple showed their daughter where the smoke detectors and fire extinguishers were located and talked to her about their fire plan. 

Strong winds have also been frightening to their son. “A week or two ago, the wind was blowing,” Brett explains. “And he’s never been scared of the wind. But he came to a room late at night because he could hear the wind blowing in the trees. He was worried trees were going to come down.”

He adds, “They’ve definitely been more anxious about, not only natural disasters but any kind of disaster since then.”  

Nightmares and difficult conversations  

Research is clear that children do not need to lose anything to be impacted by a natural disaster. The threat of danger, or witnessing danger around them, is destabilizing enough for a child’s sense of safety. And both witnessing and experiencing trauma directly can contribute to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a mental health condition with symptoms that can impact daily life.    

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, signs and symptoms of PTSD in children include becoming upset when something triggers memories of the event, nightmares and sleep problems, being easily startled, constantly looking for threats, restlessness, fidgeting and irritability, among others. 

“Every child and adult, actually, experiences traumatic events in a different way” depending on their personalities, their community support system and what the storytelling is around the experience is, says Jill Williams, licensed clinical social worker and owner of Flourish Counseling & Wellness in Asheville, which works with children as young as 3, teens and adults. 

Anxiety can manifest differently among age groups. Preschool-age children will have a lot of questions and will parrot the answers they hear. This age doesn’t understand the finality of death, Williams says, and may require a lot of verbal reassurance. Small children might also use play to express their feelings, like donning dress-up clothes to play as a firefighter rescuing someone or pretending to cut down trees with toy tools.  

Elementary school-age children will have questions about topics that might make the adults uncomfortable because the answers seem “dark” or “morbid,” Williams says. She recommends that parents keep their answers factual and that they can research answers together. 

This resonates with the Tingleys, who found themselves discussing death with their kids in a manner they had not anticipated. “What was hardest as a parent going through this is that I think they have been able to kind of think of their own mortality,” explains Brett. “When you’re 7, you don’t think about dying. So, having friends that they’ve known their whole lives pass like that …” he trails off. 

Middle school-age kids may also have questions that parents feel are “dark” or “morbid,” Williams says. But she warns parents not to dismiss such questions as “inappropriate.” This is an age when children may not be able to sort out accurate information from misinformation, so it’s important for adults to answer questions or help find the correct answers. 

Among all ages, Williams says, parents should point out who the helpers are and emphasize that a community exists to support them. Parents should let kids know about family members or friends that they can go and stay with if there’s a future emergency and make sure they understand parents have a plan for their safety. Children can even help the family with safety planning, like assembling a to-go bag.

‘It’s OK not to be OK’

Children’s responses to trauma will depend on their exposure, but “even more importantly” it will depend on how the adults around them handle themselves and interpret the events, Williams says. 

For example, her family lives near the Blue Ridge Parkway, and they could hear lots of trees falling during the storm. They sheltered in their basement during Helene, and she was intentional about staying calm for her teen while responding to the threats. 

“My kid was able to see that they have two parents who, even though we were very worried, were keeping our cool,” Williams explains. “We were focused on the goal of keeping the basement clean.” The couple gave their teenager a job — make sure the dog stayed out of the water, got treats and remained calm — and it helped make them feel in control. 

“My kid’s narrative [about Helene] was: ‘This horrible thing happened, and my parents kept us safe, and all the neighboring adults got out and helped everybody,’” she says. 

Williams recommends parents be age-appropriate, honest and fact-based when discussing tragedy. “It may feel good to us as adults to give our children this false sense of security as a temporary measure,” she says. “But what happens is that kids will then start to question, ‘Well, that [thing Mom and Dad said] doesn’t match reality.’ … Your kid is now left to create this horror story of their own without you having any input in it.”

The Tingleys were honest with their children about the Wiselys’ and Petruccis’ deaths; they told them about it immediately after they learned from Lance Wisely.  

“We have taken the path of being pretty transparent with them about what happened,” Elizabeth says. According to Lance Wisely’s post on Facebook, the foursome tried to evacuate from their home in Green Mountain and were swept into the Toe River and killed. The Tingleys explained how the flooding led the family to try to leave their home and evacuate in their car. But the car started to float and they had to escape. While trying to get to safety, the floodwater was so strong that it overpowered them, and that’s how their friends died. 

“Their parents had two bad choices because it turns out later that the water came up within 2 inches of the ceiling in the house,” Elizabeth continues. “We talked about that and we said, ‘Sometimes you can do the best that you can, and you make the smartest choice that you feel like you can make in the moment, and it still might not give you the outcome that you hope it will.’ They didn’t do anything wrong. They didn’t make any mistakes. It’s just really, really bad luck, and it’s really scary that happened.”

Buncombe County Schools was proactive about arranging for the kids to meet weekly with a counselor during the school day, Elizabeth says. “We’ve felt very supported,” she says. 

The Tingleys say they’re letting their children express all their feelings, and they are acknowledging that “weird outbursts or something that doesn’t necessarily seem directly related to grief or loss or the fear of a storm” can be part of their processing, Elizabeth says. “It’s OK not to be OK,” Brett adds. 

They try to reassure their children’s anxiety as best they can. 

“We’re always going to make the smartest choices that we can to keep all of us safe and healthy,” says Elizabeth. “Resiliency, I’m hoping, is something that will come out of this for them — especially  to recognize their own strength and their own ability to adapt to difficult situations.”