Houston’s kids again must cope with life-altering disaster
Experts say compounding trauma could affect many’s outlook on future
Isaac Heider said he was fine, but the 12-year-old barely took a breath as he rushed through a seemingly endless list of worries.
Are his grandparents safe? He doesn’t want them to be sick.
When will he get to go outside? His family’s home in Montrose has only a small outdoor patio and he’s not getting any exercise.
Will he get to see his friends again? If he doesn’t go back to school soon, the eighth-graders will graduate and he’ll never see them again.
“I just want this to be over,” said Isaac, who attends St. Stephen’s Episcopal School. “Things were finally getting back to normal” after
Hurricane Harvey.
Like Isaac, children across Houston are trying to cope with the most recent in a series of lifealtering disasters that have befallen the fourth largest city in the U.S.
The Memorial Day and Tax Day floods swept through Houston in 2015 and 2016, flooding homes and wrecking havoc. But they turned out to be just a dress rehearsal for Harvey in 2017, which dumped more than 50 inches of rain on the city, shuttering schools for weeks
and displaced countless Houstonians. It was followed by Tropical Storm Imelda in 2019, which brought even more water.
And now, the novel coronavirus is forcing people to isolate themselves at home as public health officials attempt to stop its rapid spread.
Given these events, experts say many Houston children are experiencing compounding trauma that could impact their entire outlook on the future.
“With children in Houston, it’s really important for (adults) to start to look for signs, symptoms and consequences of prolonged stress,” said Jamie Freeny, director of the Center for School Behavioral Health at Mental Health America of Greater Houston. “Their stress response system may not develop normally.”
It’s important for parents and teachers to be vigilant, experts say, as climate change is expected to bring about more flooding and, potentially, more disease.
Disaster after disaster
Isaac’s family home in Meyerland — the setting of his very earliest memories — took on so much water during Harvey that his family was trapped on the second floor for two days. They were forced to live in a hotel “for a while,” he said.
The Heider’s home had flooded numerous times, Isaac said, and his parents finally had enough. They sold the house in February, just in time for a disaster of a different kind: COVID-19.
“There really hasn’t been a break since 2016 before (Harvey),” Isaac said. “Everything was really good (before the pandemic): It was a new year and it seemed like everything was going to go great and out of nowhere this all happened. Who would have known?”
Heider’s parents have been able to work from home, he said, but being an only child is lonely. He misses his friends, his teachers and playing outside. He’s ready for life to go back to normal.
The Rev. Carissa BaldwinMcGinnis of Northside Episcopal Church said church groups are seeing a lot of children across Houston experiencing trauma — and even grief — as normalcy and friendships are lost because of COVID-19 and all the events that have come before it.
Baldwin-McGinnis is an executive committee member for The Metropolitan Organization, a nonprofit that brings faith-based groups together to influence policymakers’ decisions. The organization is currently working to raise awareness for the food and housing needs low-income and minority communities are facing during the pandemic.
“We know that the nervous system of children gets extra triggered when there are multiple experiences of complex trauma,” Baldwin-McGinnis said. “If they’ve had losses in the past, they’re less able to regulate their emotions, they have higher levels of anxiety … (and) you can get all kinds of crazy behavior including higher aggression.”
The organization has found this to be a heightened problem in lower-income areas, where parents out of work means kids cannot eat and poor internet connectivity means they are completely detached from friends and school.
Poverty compounds stress
Adriana’s teenage sons are having an especially difficult time with quarantine. Both are autistic and so terrified of catching the virus they refuse to even step outside their Greenspoint-area home.
“My kids have found themselves desperate and at home,” she said. “They’re both afraid.”
One son is so worried that a recent trip to the grocery store launched his anxiety so high he was swearing profusely beneath a mask and gloves. He refused to get out of the car.
Adriana, who asked to be identified only by her first name because she is in the country illegally and fears deportation, has been out of work for five weeks. Her husband is still working, but they were only able to pay rent and utilities this month by dipping into their savings. She doesn’t know what they’ll do next month.
“The thinner the safety net, the greater the mental health impact on children in the sequences of these events,” Baldwin-McGinnis said.
Still, Adriana is trying to keep her kids happy and healthy.
During Harvey, the internet kept them entertained. Her Zoom connection stalled and froze numerous times as she tried to explain how spotty the internet connection was in her neighborhood right now. It’s no longer a viable option.
She began explaining how she’s relied on baking and cooking to keep them busy during this time of isolation when a chubby-cheeked boy popped up on Adriana’s video feed, whispering fervently in her ear.
“He’s asking when all this is going to be over,” she said. “He’s afraid.”
Climate change fuels disasters
Houston has experienced its fair share of life-altering disruptions in the past five years, and some scientists say these types of events are likely to increase because of climate change.
Studies have consistently shown that greenhouse gas-induced warming should increase the amount of rain that falls during a tropical cyclone. And a paper presented at the American Geophysical Union in New Orleans in 2017 found that climate change made Hurricane Harvey’s 51 inches of rain three times more likely to occur when comparing today’s climate to that of the 1880s.
That paper, co-authored by a Rice University postdoctoral researcher, determined that extreme rain events will continue to occur if climate change remains unchecked.
The coronavirus pandemic — which descended on Houston in early March — is a different type of disaster. Though climate change doesn’t appear to be influencing its spread, “the root causes of climate change also increase the risks of pandemics,” according to Aaron Bernstein, director of Harvard University’s Center for Climate, Health and the Global Environment.
For example, deforestation — as well as the increasing temperature of the land and sea — is forcing animals and humans to come into more contact with each other than ever before. This means that zoonotic diseases — diseases spread between animals and humans — such as AIDS, SARS and the bird flu are more prevalent. COVID-19 is a zoonotic disease, but scientists still are trying to pinpoint the origins of it.
“Pandemics usually begin as viruses in animals that jump to people when we make contact with them,” Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance, wrote in a Feb. 27 letter in the New York Times. “These spillovers are increasing exponentially as our ecological footprint brings us closer to wildlife in remote areas and the wildlife trade brings these animals into urban centers.”
Climate change also makes other infectious diseases, such as Lyme disease, malaria and dengue fever spread more quickly, Bernstein said.
“Future risks are not easy to foretell, but climate change hits hard on several fronts that matter to when and where pathogens appear, including temperature and rainfall patterns,” he said. “To help limit the risk of infectious diseases, we should do all we can to vastly reduce greenhouse gas emissions and limit global warming to 1.5 degrees (Celsius).”
That temperature limit is a widely accepted benchmark for global warming set by the Paris climate agreement, which was reached in December 2015 to combat climate change and by 2018 had been ratified by 194 countries, according to the United Nations. President Donald Trump’s administration currently is in the process of pulling the U.S. out of the agreement.
‘What’s happening?!’
Every time the jarring sound of an Amber Alert or a thunderstorm warning erupts from Meagan Clanahan’s cellphone, her 9-year-old twins start to panic.
“What’s happening?! What’s happening?!” Quinn and Ryan ask fearfully.
They’re undoubtedly having flashbacks to that moment in 2017, when Harvey’s rains refused to give way, tornado warnings were constant and they had to sleep in the closet under the stairs, Clanahan sitting right outside the door to protect them.
Their Katy home has never flooded, but the fear is still there, Clanahan said.
Now they’re facing a completely different type of fear.
“The kids have not been out in public — they haven’t been in a store — since we got back into town (after spring break),” Clanahan said. “It’s just been so wild.”
Her kids have been handling isolation pretty well, she added, although there have been some meltdowns and tantrums.
She’s worried, though, what they’ll take away from this whole experience.
“I wonder if, a year from now, if there’s another virus, will it reset their panic?” Clanahan said. “Will it be like every time my thunderstorm alert goes off on my phone?”
“With children in Houston, it’s really important for (adults) to start to look for signs, symptoms and consequences of prolonged stress.”
Jamie Freeny, director of the Center for School Behavioral Health at Mental Health America of Greater Houston