Ketangguhan Mental Anak Dalam Menghadapi Bencana

Abstract

Disaster is inevitably affecting the mental health of the suffered community. For the children, it not only damages their mental health but also disrupts their
development. It is therefore discernable that children belong to susceptible group for they are insufficiently equipped with skill and resources to mitigate disaster and highly dependent on the significant others during their recovery process. As the other group age, children community has also natural adaptive-mechanism in overcoming their trauma from disaster. It means that their reaction to disaster are relatively similar namely from panic, fear, stress to traumatic stress, but alongside with passing time they gradually adapt themselves to post-disaster situation. Eventually, it is observable that the small amount of the victimized children shows the symptoms of psychological malady while most of them live normal life. In many cases, the adaptive children are not affected at all with disaster and behave normally as they did before the disaster. They seem to posses high resiliency. The differences of their reaction to disaster raises a question “ Why some children remain tough and behave normally in the aftermath of disaster while the other don’t?” This study is aimed as well to invent the factors influencing the resilience of children in overcoming the disaster aftermath.