Children of Katrina
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- $29.99
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- $29.99
Publisher Description
Winner, Betty and Alfred McClung Lee Book Award, Association for Humanist Sociology, 2016
Outstanding Scholarly Contribution Award of the Section on Children and Youth, American Sociological Association, 2016
Honorable Mention, Leo Goodman Award, Methodology Section, American Sociological Association, 2016
When children experience upheaval and trauma, adults often view them as either vulnerable and helpless or as resilient and able to easily “bounce back.” But the reality is far more complex for the children and youth whose lives are suddenly upended by disaster. How are children actually affected by catastrophic events and how do they cope with the damage and disruption?
Children of Katrina offers one of the only long-term, multiyear studies of young people following disaster. Sociologists Alice Fothergill and Lori Peek spent seven years after Hurricane Katrina interviewing and observing several hundred children and their family members, friends, neighbors, teachers, and other caregivers. In this book, they focus intimately on seven children between the ages of three and eighteen, selected because they exemplify the varied experiences of the larger group. They find that children followed three different post-disaster trajectories—declining, finding equilibrium, and fluctuating—as they tried to regain stability. The children’s moving stories illuminate how a devastating disaster affects individual health and well-being, family situations, housing and neighborhood contexts, schooling, peer relationships, and extracurricular activities. This work also demonstrates how outcomes were often worse for children who were vulnerable and living in crisis before the storm. Fothergill and Peek clarify what kinds of assistance children need during emergency response and recovery periods, as well as the individual, familial, social, and structural factors that aid or hinder children in getting that support.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
From the first sentence ("For Cierra, the sound of Katrina is the sound of people screaming' "), readers will be riveted by this account of a seven-year research study into the lives of children who experienced Hurricane Katrina. Sociology professors Fothergill and Peek chose as their subjects seven children who were between four and 15 years old when the hurricane hit in August 2005. Zach was seven and Isabel nine when Katrina reached land; both are white and from middle-class families. The authors show the huge difference that resources like family networks, schools, housing options, and advocates made for Zach and Isabel's "upward track" after Katrina. In comparison, Clinton, an African-American boy from a low-income family who was four when Katrina hit, struggled in the post-Katrina recovery, despite a few advantages including enrollment in a high-performing school program. Cierra, from a single-parent, working-class family, was 11 during Katrina; thanks in part to advocates and youth mentors, she actually saw her situation improve afterwards. Simple graphs help illustrate some of the more complex concepts (recovery trajectories, for example), and selections of poetry and artwork by the children add flavor to their stories. Readers expecting a purely feel-good story of triumph over adversity will be disappointed, but both laypeople and specialists interested in how children cope with large-scale trauma should find this extensively researched study worth the effort.