What to Do When the News Scares You
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This latest installment in the bestselling What To Do series tackles children’s feelings of anxiety around current events 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 scary events into perspective. And, if children start to worry or become anxious about things they’ve heard, there are ideas to help them 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, how—as a means of introducing a sense of perspective.
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.
Dr. Toner has coauthored books with Claire A. B. Freeland, PhD, including the What to Do Series for Kids 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.
Janet McDonnell is a writer and illustrator whose characters populate many books and magazines for children. She has both taught and written for children from preschool to high school.
She lives in Arlington Heights, Illinois. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
Short, interactive lessons about media tactics and source reliability are interspersed with exercises to help kids cope with the strong emotions that can accompany exposure to “scary news….” Children are invited to become investigators, with the book providing spaces for them to jot down observations each time they learn a new aspect of reporting, including camera angles, opinions versus facts, and the famous W questions…. From knowledge comes power over emotions.
—Kirkus Reviews
- Extensive note to parents and caregivers
- Chapter 1. Sometimes scary things happen
- Chapter 2. What is news?
- Chapter 3. Things that make the news more scary
- Chapter 4. Did you see that!
- Chapter 5. Keeping it real
- Chapter 6. Un-news
- Chapter 7. Taking care of you
- Chapter 8. Plan of action
- Chapter 9. You Can Do It!
What to Do When the News Scares You (PDF, 509KB)
Read this adapted excerpt from the Introduction to Parents and Caregivers provides strategies to help kids understand and process the messages around and to put scary events into perspective.
