Talking to Children About Bushfires Without Frightening Them
In late 2019, some of the children arrived at school having seen footage of the bushfires.
They wanted to talk about it. The teachers’ account of how that conversation was handled ran in the school newsletter a few days later, and it is the most useful thing we have found in twenty years of archives.
The principle
The teachers set themselves one constraint before they began, and it is the whole method:
Bearing in mind the need to empower the children and not make them feel overwhelmed.
Both halves matter. Not avoid the subject — children who have already seen the footage are not protected by adult silence; they are left alone with it. And not tell them everything — a four-year-old does not need the full scale of a national disaster.
Empower and do not overwhelm. Give a child something true, and give them something to do.
What they actually said
The conversation covered three things.
Some of this is normal, and some of it is not. The children learned that certain Australian native plants need fire — that heat is part of how they reproduce, and that this is a good thing. This is true, it is interesting, and it gives a frightened child somewhere to stand that is not pure catastrophe.
Some of it is genuinely sad. When fire destroys the places animals live, that is a loss, and the teachers said so. They did not smooth it over. Children can tell when an adult is managing them, and the trust costs more than the comfort is worth.
Here is a specific animal you can think about. The conversation settled on koalas — how special they are, and how hard things would be for them now that a lot of their trees were gone. One animal a child can picture does more than an abstraction they cannot.
The newsletter then warned parents what was coming:
So if your child says “I want to adopt a koala for Christmas”, that is why.
Why the koala worked
A young child cannot hold “a continent is on fire”. It is too large, and there is nothing they can do with it, and that combination — enormous and helpless — is exactly what produces anxiety.
A koala is the right size. A child can picture it, care about it, and act on it. Adopting one is a small, concrete, achievable response to something otherwise overwhelming.
This is not a trick to change the subject. It is the mechanism by which a child’s concern gets somewhere to go.
The following year the same instinct showed up again. During Save the Koala Month the children learned what a marsupial is, what koalas eat, how long they sleep, and how habitat is lost — not only to fire but to land clearing and development. The newsletter records that the children became “very concerned about the koalas becoming extinct like the dinosaurs”, and immediately started working on what could be done about it.
What children do when you let them
Around the same period, one class was invited to think more broadly about the environment, and used art to work out what they wanted to say.
They drew the world and placed it in their own hands. They named what they wanted to save — from tigers and whales to ants and goats. They talked about switching off lights, saving water, reducing, reusing, recycling.
Then they designed an environmentally friendly building, complete with gardens, solar panels and a pond on the roof, and filled it with what the teacher described as “happy humans” — faces drawn on paper and placed inside.
Nobody instructed them to be optimistic. Given a real problem and the means to respond, that is what children did with it.
For parents
If your child has seen something frightening on the news, the sequence that worked here is short enough to remember:
- Do not wait for them to raise it twice. If they have seen it, it is already in the room.
- Tell them something true that is not frightening. There is almost always a fact like the fire-adapted plants — accurate, interesting, and not a lie.
- Do not deny the sad part. Name it, briefly, and stay calm while you do.
- Make it small enough to hold. One animal, one place, one thing.
- Give them something to do. Action is what converts fear into concern.
Then let them go and draw a building with a pond on the roof.