One Day You’ll Thank Me: Cyclone Gabrielle and how to talk to kids about extreme weather events

Explaining a major weather event to kids can be difficult to navigate. Photo / Getty Images

As Cyclone Gabrielle stormed its way across the North Island this week, families hunkered down, no doubt with that sense of stress and anxiety familiar to the lockdowns of the Covid years: where parents juggled working from home, or not being able to work at all, with trying to keep children entertained, educated and calm amid the multifaceted impacts of a pandemic.

This year, as some regions experience their second major weather event in as many weeks, those same issues of disruption to daily life and feelings of uncertainty and fear for our families’ have come to the fore. Hard to comprehend and rationalise for an adult, how can we explain what’s going on to our children and keep them feeling safe?

On today’s episode of One Day You’ll Thank Me, hosts Jenni Mortimer and Rebecca Haszard enlist the help of psychotherapist Kyle MacDonald to find out how parents can help themselves and their children understand and work through the stressors of being in a major weather event.

MacDonald advises that if a child appears anxious or upset about an incident like cyclone Gabrielle, the first thing a parent might need to review is how they’re feeling themselves.

“One of the first things to encourage people [to do is] to reflect: if your kids are really anxious, are they picking something up in you or your partner or the people in your household? And do we actually need to start by regulating ourselves first?”

He says while as a parent you may not identify with feeling stressed about the cyclone, “perhaps you’re stressed or wound up about having to work from home and juggle everything. It’s the old cliché, isn’t it? Put your own oxygen mask on first.”

One way to mitigate those feelings is to work through the process of preparing for a potential disaster together.

“It’s easy for us to get a bit cynical about the preparation, you know, tying down the outdoor furniture and getting the bottles of water,” says MacDonald.

“But actually, regardless of whether or not we practically need those, preparing is really useful for managing anxiety for ourselves and for our little ones because it gives us something to do and it feels like we’re in control of the things that we can control.”

MacDonald says carrying out these steps with our kids is a way to “teach some really useful life skills about how we get ready for things and make sure that we’re as prepared as we can be. So we generate that sense of safety and security.”

Psychologist Kyle MacDonald says if our children appear anxious about cyclone Gabrielle we should reflect on our own feelings and reactions. Photo / Supplied

When it comes to the disruption some families will have faced this week to their daycare, school and work routines, MacDonald says there are two seemingly contradictory recommendations for dealing with an upheaval to your household’s regular programming.

“The first one is, as much as possible, we should try and stick to our scheduling: waking up and bed times and nap times and food times and all those sorts of things.

“However, I think it’s also true that if we’re finding sticking to the schedules really stressful, if that’s actually a point of stress for us or for our little ones, it’s actually okay, within sort of common sense boundaries, to choose - in the short term, hopefully just a couple of days that we’re all at home for this storm - to throw it all out the window and actually be creative because I think structures are only helpful as long as they’re helpful.”

• For more from Kyle MacDonald on how to navigate the emotions and questions for children with facing a major event, listen to today’s episode of One Day You’ll Thank Me below.
• You can follow the podcast at iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes are out every Thursday.