Teachers Calm Pupils’ War Fears : Mental health: Students express anxieties over images of bombs and bullets. Explain what’s going on and curb TV viewing, teachers caution.

Carolina Flores, principal of Bayer Elementary School in San Ysidro, stood in the school’s assembly hall Friday before 800 students with a geography lesson in mind.

Using a globe, she stressed to her pupils that the barrage of bombs, rockets and bullets dominating the news is on the other side of the world, and that they were secure in their neighborhoods and homes.

“Some of them are very frightened,” Flores said of her students, most of whom are from working-class Latino families, many of them recent immigrants from Mexico. “They think the bombs are going to hit here.”

In recent days, Flores said, some mothers had reported that their children had upset stomachs and other ailments traceable to nervousness and fears about the war. Also noticeable, she said, was erratic behavior among normally well-behaved students.

“I explained to them that the fighting is very far away, and that we’re very safe here,” Flores said. “I told them, ‘Yes, war is occurring, and yes, our soldiers are there. But the war is on the other side of the globe. It’s not on the other side of the street. It’s not just over the hill.’ ”

Children of both non-military and military families have anxieties related to the Persian Gulf war that need to be addressed, say school counselors and child psychologists.

Young children in particular who have been exposed to the stream of radio and television reports relating to the war are confused and anxious, sometimes fearing that the fighting will spread to their own homes.

“There is a lot of confusion and they are hearing things they don’t understand,” said Diane McSweeney-Harrell, a counselor at Hawthorne Elementary and Holmes Elementary. “They come to school and say a lot of women and children were bombed, and there is a lot of fear and confusion.”

Nearly all of a combined class of fourth- and fifth-graders at Bayview Terrace Elementary School in Pacific Beach, working on a creative arts project, drew guns, rockets or war planes.

“There’s a point in which people are on overload, and they need a break from the news,” said Carolyn Morris, director of guidance services at San Diego Unified. “If we are in some way going to try to carry on a normal routine, we have to block this out and get on with life. For adults, this may be easy, but for the children, it may not be.”

Morris said the constant bombardment of violent images from the war may have some children confused about their own safety.

“They might get very excited about the violence, and we need to know that it’s just time to turn the television off and get on with a normal routine. The adult has to make that decision for the child,” Morris said.

“Stress is really affecting everyone,” said Marshall Lewis, executive director of Rancho Park Hospital, a mental health facility for children and adolescents. “The immediacy of the news and the media has caused a higher level of stimulation and anxiety than any other bad news that I can remember.”

Lewis said patients at the hospital are “more anxious, more worried, having trouble getting to sleep, they need to have the light on at night to sleep . . . basically regressing.”

Lewis said young children often reflect the anxiety expressed by the adults around them, and the intensity of news coverage of the event is not lost on the children.

Counselors in San Diego schools say the effects of the war on children of non-military families have ranged from depression and aggressiveness to a recurrence of violent memories. Ed Leon, counselor at Mann Middle School where Asian-Americans make up 24% of the student population, said some students from Southeast Asia have experienced “flashbacks” because of the Persian Gulf war.

“They have experienced death first hand, and they’ve walked through fields of dead bodies,” Leon said of some of his Cambodian and Vietnamese students. “And they remember those experiences when this kind of thing comes up in the news.”

“We are doing the best we can in school and encouraging them to talk to adults,” Leon said.

Morris said children also have to be taught tolerance of others, particularly of foreign students.

“There were situations where some of those students are being looked at by their peers as the enemy, and we don’t want that to happen,” Morris said.

Leon said in one instance a Latino student said the United States should “send all those damned Iraqis back where they came from,” even though they were U.S. citizens.

Ann Rubenstein, a counselor at Bayview Terrace Elementary in Pacific Beach, said students have questioned classroom lessons about resolving conflicts peacefully in light of the popular war being fought on their television screens at home.

“What we try really hard to do, because we don’t want to politicize the issue, we really talk about the fact that we have differences and people handle different things in different ways.”

Rubinstein and other counselors offer these suggestions to parents:

* Don’t let young children watch news coverage of the war alone. Parents should actively “ask their children if they understand what they are watching because children may be reading more into it than what is actually going on,” Morris said.

* Turn off the television. Getting information is important and educational, but repeated images of, for example, a bombed building may be harmful.

* Allow children to fantasize through playing games, drawings and conversation.

“It’s a way of getting the fears out of the kids’ system,” Lewis said. “If parents have an opportunity to structure the play, try to get it away from directly playing Persian Gulf war. The real value of play is helping the child to develop his defenses and distance himself from what is painful.”

* Establish a normal routine. “Try to maintain as normal a schedule as possible because that’s reassuring to the child and to all of us that there’s a real world that’s safe,” Lewis said.

Times staff writer Patrick McDonnell contributed to this story.