– A Kid’s Guide to Understanding Current Events
– Part of the What-to-Do Guides for Kids Series from Magination Press – part of the American Psychological Association
This latest installment in the bestselling What-to-Do Guides for Kids Series tackles children’s feelings of anxiety around current events locally and around the world and what is portrayed in the news. Scary news is an inevitable part of life. This book can support and guide efforts to help scary news seem a bit more manageable for young people.
Whether from television news reports, the car radio, digital media or adult discussions, children are often bombarded with information about the world around them. When the events being described include violence, extreme weather events, a disease outbreak or discussions of more dispersed threats such as climate change, children may become frightened and overwhelmed. Parents and caregivers can be prepared to help them understand and process the messages around them by using this book.
What to Do When the News Scares You provides a way to help children put local and global scary events in the news into perspective. If children start to worry or become anxious about things they’ve heard, there are ideas and activities in this book to help them to calm down and cope. This book also helps children identify reporters’ efforts to add excitement to the story which may also make threats seem more imminent, universal, and extreme.
Read and complete the activities in What to Do When the News Scares You with your child to help them to understand the news in context – who, what, where, when and how – as a means of introducing a sense of perspective.
About the Author:
Jacqueline B. Toner, PhD is a clinical psychologist with more than 30 years in private practice working with children and parents. She earned her PhD from University of Virginia and serves as Chief Facilitator for a medical resources project with Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and Carnegie Mellon University. She has coauthored books with Claire A. B. Freeland, PhD, including the What-to-Do Guides for Kids Series as well as Depression: A Teen’s Guide to Survive and Thrive and Yes I Can: A Girl and Her Wheelchair. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland. More information is available on her website HERE.
About the Illustrator:
Janet McDonnell is a writer and illustrator living in the US. Her characters populate many books and magazines for children.
