What Happened to MY World: Helping Children Cope with Natural Disaster and Catastrophe

What Happened to MY World? Helping Children Cope with Natural Disaster and Catastrophe is a resource for parents, teachers, and anyone working with children. Adults and children throughout the United States witnessed the destruction from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita — perhaps the largest natural disasters in United States history. Millions of people were directly affected, and hundreds of thousands suffered significant loss or trauma.

What Happened to MY World was written to help adults peer into the minds of children from infancy through the teenage rears, and understand their confusion, fears, grief, and struggles to understand why the forces of nature can suddenly disrupt or destroy the world as they know it. It is to help both those who experience and survive catastrophe firsthand, as well as the children who witness from a distance and wonder what it was like or whether someday they will find themselves in similar circumstances.

Extraordinary events like these test us all as citizens and human beings sharing a planet. They test us as parents, both as guardians of our children trying to keep them emotionally safe, and as our children’s teachers trying to raise them to become enlightened and empathetic adults. Children grow into the kind of people they will become at least in part by how we guide them though their questions, concerns, and fears, and whether we use the teachable moments thrust upon us to provide them with support, care, and guidance.