The quake children
The legacy of Canterbury’s most devastating quake can be seen in its youngest. Eight years on, how are our children coping?
Rachel Crawford didn’t know she was pregnant when she drove a dead woman into town on February 22, 2011. She and an Israeli backpacker, who were outside Linwood’s Wick’s Fish Supply when it collapsed, tried to take Natasha Hadfield to Christchurch Hospital but had to leave her body at a triage centre in Latimer Square.
For years, Crawford stopped to cry every time she cycled past a hand-painted memorial to the mother-of-one.
‘‘I felt guilty that I had taken the body away . . . I had PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder), definitely,’’ she said.
‘‘My daughter was fine; she was a healthy, full term birth and then four to six weeks [later] she stopped feeding.’’
Canterbury schools and clinical services found disordered behaviour – anxiety, bed wetting, and problems sleeping – became more common after the 2011 earthquake, even among children who were still in utero when it happened.
They have since fought to get ahead of the region’s chronic mental health problem, with Canterbury District Health Board chief executive David Meates calling their effects on the region’s youngest ‘‘profound’’.
Her daughter , now 7, had a feeding tube in her stomach until she was one year old and didn’t walk until she was two, Crawford said.
She ‘‘wasn’t catching on’’ during her first years at Banks Avenue School and would come home screaming and in tears.
Though her anxiety is improving, her daughter still doesn’t eat well, worries about other children getting hurt in the playground, and struggles to distinguish visual cues from reality: ‘‘My Little Pony is too scary for her,’’ Crawford said.
‘‘It’s only looking back now that you think, I was an insane stress ball and then she was unable to feed. She was in utero when I was in a high, high cortisol state.
‘‘Even if she was pre-disposed to have a lot of anxiety, I think it didn’t help her,’’ Crawford said of the earthquakes.
NEUROLOGICAL DIFFERENCES
Children who started school in the years following the February 2011 earthquake are ‘‘neurologically different’’, according to a world-first research project by University of Canterbury associate professor Kathleen Liberty.
Pathways to the decisionmaking parts of their brains had become ‘‘disregulated’’ by the chronic stress of aftershocks, leading to impulsive and sometimes aggressive behaviours schools have struggled to cope with.
Against all international evidence, Christchurch children did not bounce back: By the end of 2015, 52 per cent of 300 study children’s behaviour had worsened, and by 2017 four in five exhibited at least one symptom of PTSD.
However, there are signs children’s mental health can be, and is, improving eight years on from the February 2011 quake.
At the Canterbury Earthquakes Symposium in November, Liberty indicated a replication study had shown greater creativity and school attendance among 4000 students under a specifically-designed intervention programme.
When contacted, Liberty and others involved in the project declined to discuss the second study. ‘‘When an earthquake strikes there is no warning . . . there is no tornado or dark clouds in the sky, or advancing floodwaters or smoke. This means there are no possible selfregulatory processes that a child can evoke before the disaster,’’ Liberty said at the symposium.
‘‘If you were 30 years old at the time of the earthquakes, you had 30 years of experience and
understanding and hopefully education.
If you were 15 months old . . . you might not have been able to walk, you would have no language.
‘‘Those age sensitive differences are why what’s happened to children is what’s different to what’s happened to us as adults.’’
‘WE THOUGHT WE WERE DOING A GOOD JOB’
Sarah Jones felt like the earthquakes made her a bad mother.
The ‘‘tiny’’ Cranford St house she, husband Warrick, Alex, then 4, and 1-year-old Grace shared was mired in liquefaction and the three parks nearby were unusable.
‘‘With the city being out of action we were really on the wrong side of town,’’ Jones said.
‘‘I consider myself a pretty chilled out and easy going person and I started yelling at the kids.
‘‘I didn’t think of it as anything other than the stress of being a mother . . . looking back on it, there was so much that went into the puzzle of being a stressed out family.
After relocating to Little River two years ago, life is feeling normal again and ‘‘I look at us as a family unit’’, Jones said.
‘‘I’m proud of myself and how I coped but I’m definitely a different person and I think, a different mother.’’
Jones said she feels anxious when her children go off on their own; Alex, now 11, said he has ‘‘a little bit of anxiety, like my dad’’.
He, Grace, and brother Ben, 6, plan to finish home schooling to attend Ao Tawhiti Unlimited Discovery next year after initially finding the school ‘‘too loud’’ for his liking.
‘‘It was quite stressful and I think we were lucky to leave at the time we did,’’ Alex said.
Another family, who The Press has decided not to name, lived in one bedroom of their Mt Pleasant home after the February 2011 quake.
Their daughters, then 4 years and 4 months old respectively, listened to army tanks driving by and helicopters overhead.
‘‘The way they are now, there’s definitely a layer of anxiety there’’, their mother said.
The family count themselves lucky – others on their street are still waiting for repairs – but the stress of the initial shock and the rebuild period has taken a toll on everyone’s health.
‘‘We kind of thought we had it together in the sense that we tried to remain pretty calm . . . try take that on board for them so they didn’t have to,’’ the father said.
‘‘We thought we were doing a good job in that regard but it was obviously impacting [the eldest daughter] more than we were aware.’’
The 11-year-old, who lost her eyebrows and eyelashes from stress, remains anxious, sometimes clingy, and hesitant about unfamiliar things.
Her younger sister had respiratory issues for most of her life the family believes were induced either by a stressaffected supply of breast milk, or by the routine use of hand sanitiser in lieu of clean water for weeks after the quake.
The transition to school was ‘‘awful’’: Not being able to stay in the class when their oldest started at the local school was a deal breaker and the family home schooled for a year before enrolling at a school on the other side of town.
The family tries to have open conversations about ‘‘controlling the controllables’’ and living in the present – not just for the children’s sake.
The father recalled ‘‘completely’’ breaking down at work about nine months after the February quake when he saw footage of the recovery efforts on television.
‘‘I got a real kick in the butt and it all caught up,’’ he said.
‘‘To sit here and say it didn’t have an impact would be a lie.’’
A NEW NORMAL
O¯ pa¯ wa School was one of the first included in Liberty’s study.
Deputy principal Shevaun Karipa said referrals to resource teachers for learning and behaviour (RTLB) ‘‘skyrocketed’’ after the quakes. Children showed up at school with the emotional capabilities of 3-year-olds, flying off the handle at every hurdle.
After implementing Liberty’s intervention strategies – in particular, having children eat after playing to reduce the likelihood of upset stomachs – ‘‘that impulsive lashing out reduced tenfold’’, Karipa said.
‘‘It’s common sense and simple when you break it down and think about it . . . but when you’re in a traditional model for a long time sometimes you don’t see how that simple change can be effective.
‘‘That was challenging but we have got there and now it’s our new normal.’’
The school makes sure children have water bottles in the classroom because disregulated brains need more hydration, and has focused on having good ventilation, lighting, and acoustics as it refurbishes its classrooms – without any hanging decorations.
Karipa said families usually understand the strategies once they are explained but ‘‘we have got a really diverse community so we don’t say ‘you shall’ or ‘you must’’’.
‘‘We try to encourage and educate; it’s very much up to the community to engage with that.’’
O¯ pa¯ wa will soon implement a final programme, named the ‘‘diamond’’ coping strategy because it helps children under pressure to ‘‘sparkle’’.
The idea, Karipa explained, is ‘‘getting children to take responsibility for managing themselves’’.
There are other initiatives to help quake-stressed children. Mana Ake, a $28 million programme funding 80 in-school mental health support staff roles, received more than 500 requests for help in its first seven months.
Sparklers, a Canterbury District Health Board-run resource, helps teachers identify anxiety in children and find ways to address it through everyday classroom activities.
Kaye Wolland, a registered psychologist involved in Sparklers, said anxiety ‘‘often goes hand in hand with other issues’’.
‘‘It’s not a one-stop shop fits all; it’s about reflective practice where the teachers can think more deeply around where those issues come from.’’