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Collaboration in Working With Children Affected by Disaster 137

Developmental Consequences

Trauma can have more lasting effects on cognition, affect regulation, rela-
tions with parents, and relations with peers, as seen in Table 10.3.
Table 10.3 Developmental Consequences of Trauma for Children

Interference with narrative, verbal coherence, memory, and concentration can have
long-term academic effects.
The negative effect of trauma on modulating aggression can lead to disturbance in
regulation of emotions across development.
Not feeling protected by parents from the effects of a disaster, a young child’s trust in
parental effectiveness and helpfulness is compromised; so is a parent’s confidence in his
or her own ability to help the child.
Disaster can cause problems with relations with peers all through child development.

School-Based Initiatives for Children Regarding Disasters

Several kinds of school-based interventions are possible and helpful for
mental health professionals to work on. These include prevention (prepa-
ration, teacher training), screening and early intervention immediately
after a disaster, reduction of traumatic reminders of the disaster, reduction
of school-based developmental consequences, arranging for school-wide
acts for safety and commemoration, and communications with parents
with referrals for treatment.
Yet achieving a collaboration between mental health professionals and
the schools is often difficult. At times of crisis, people turn to the roles
and systems for communication and influence with which they are most
familiar and tend to feel overwhelmed at first by offers of help from the
outside. Principals may reject the offer of help, stating that their school-
based support teams are sufficient to deal with the disaster. Offers of help
from outside a school are accepted under three conditions: (a) if there have
been preliminary collaborative efforts that have succeeded in making the
“outsider” someone the leaders of the school think to call upon, (b) if the
principal or superintendent has an unusual ability to think creatively, and
(c) if the disaster becomes unremitting and overwhelming.
Even when the first of these conditions has occurred, the rate of turn-
over of principals in many schools is so great that the principal with whom
the mental health professional has established a collaborative relation may
have left by the time a disaster occurs. Further, in a large metropolitan