Impact of Distressing Media Imagery on Children

Children are particularly fragile and vulnerable to the impact of traumatic events or their mediated representation because they lack the skills and experience in the management of difficult information. Children have different concepts of health and disaster than adults and institutions, depending mainly on their cognitive, emotional, social, psychological, and physical development. If left alone with threatening messages, children are less able to fully understand the information to which they had been exposed. Therefore, they may fail to integrate the external data into their psychological schema of coping strategies. Children usually count on caregivers to deal with stressors, and they want to be reassured by receiving plausible explanations for upsetting or unfamiliar events. Thus, it is important for caregivers to be trained in anticipating the proper response to children's questions, how to best adapt it to each case, and the appropriate manner to discuss with them the origin and nature of their fears and emotions. Our goal is to emphasize the important role that pediatricians, and particularly family pediatricians, may play in recognizing initial symptoms of stress disorder following exposures of children to violent imagery proposed by media.