Kids are drawing pictures of the new coronavirus. That’s a good thing.

Experts who work on mitigating the negative impact of disasters on youth emphasize that art and other creative outlets play an important role in helping children process what’s going on around them, and offer an important opportunity for parents to help them navigate potentially traumatic events.

“If you think about children as meaning makers, they're constantly trying to make meaning of this,” University of California, San Francisco psychologist Chandra Ghosh Ippen told the Bulletin. “And one of the things that they make meaning of is danger. How much danger am I in? What does this mean for me? What does this mean for our family?”

The effects of this disaster on children have barely begun to be assessed—the scale of the crisis and the limits lockdowns impose on field research will make understanding the psychological and emotional toll on communities particularly challenging. But people who have studied and worked with children affected by previous disasters say some things are predictable: Families and communities in already vulnerable situations will struggle more. And managing anxiety will become more difficult as adults and children alike struggle the effects of social isolation and near-constant exposure to media reporting about the disaster.

Robin S. Cox is professor of the disaster and emergency management graduate program at  Royal Roads University in Victoria, Canada and leads the ResiliencebyDesign Research Innovation Lab, which uses arts and other creative methods to engage young people on the problems caused by disasters, climate change, and conflict. She explained that drawing can help children express emotions they may not even know they have. “Children may not have as much access to physical activity, which is another way of managing anxiety and fear,” Cox said. “So [art] provides another way of managing anxiety and engaging with those emotions.”

Drawing also helps kids make sense of a threat that is inherently difficult to grasp, even for adults, by giving it a physical form.

Ghosh Ippen is the associate director of the child trauma research program at the University of California, San Francisco and a member of the National Child Traumatic Stress Network. She’s also authored several picture books for children on coping with trauma. “In drawings, you can do things that in life you can't do,” she said. “You can have the coronavirus be a thing. When you personify something, when you give something a body, you're able to talk about it, you're able to manage it. In play, kids are able to beat it up, they're able to jail it, they're able to yell at it, they're able to say, ‘Hey, you go away!’”

Illustrations by children have long served as a heart-wrenching reminder of the horrors experienced during and after catastrophes. The Austrian artist Friedl Dicker-Brandeis famously helped distract children brought to the Nazi’s Theresienstadt ghetto in Czechsolovakia with clandestine art lessons that have since been considered an early form of art therapy. Drawings by young students who survived the nuclear attack on Hiroshima were presented in the 2013 documentary Pictures from a Hiroshima Schoolyard. Pictures created by Syrian children in UNICEF-supported schools are both hopeful and haunting.

Sociologists Lori Peek and Alice Fothergill spent seven years studying children who were directly affected by Hurricane Katrina, which displaced more than a million people from the Gulf Coast in 2005. Although the experience of affluent families was often very different than what lower-income communities saw, Peek said that she and Fothergill noticed that many children displaced by the hurricane reflected on it in similar ways.

“The kids were all drawing these pictures that always had black or brown crayons to color this dark, murky water,” said Peek, professor of sociology and director of the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “And sometimes it was kids who'd been in the water, who'd really seen the water. Sometimes it was kids who hadn't seen it, but they knew about it through the media, or just through stories. But there was this remarkable consistency in what children were coloring.”