Parenting through disaster: How California’s wildfires are affecting children and families
As Angelenos — many still displaced or facing the ongoing threat of new blazes — return to neighborhoods scarred by wildfires, parents shoulder the task of guiding their children through the emotional, physical and social challenges that come with recovering from catastrophe.
Recent fires in the Castaic area in northern Los Angeles County and in parts of San Diego County have only added to the devastation. The destruction of schools and other vital community spaces has left families without the support systems they rely on. Meanwhile, smoke and ash from the fires continue to spread, compounding concerns about children’s physical health and safety.
“When families with children experience disaster-induced community loss and displacement, they are not only in need of a place to sleep at night, but also a place that becomes the center of the full ecosystem of informal support and formal institutions on which parents and children are dependent,” said Emily Smith-Greenaway, a professor of sociology and spatial sciences at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.
“Anyone who lives in a community is rooted in it, but kids have a way of creating a deeper, more complex root system, making the uprooting of it all and the need to replant one’s family elsewhere an especially daunting task.”