Meltdowns, nightmares and regressions: The L.A. fires are taking a traumatic toll on kids

Los Angeles Times

06-03-2025

By the time the Fortier family heard the insistent pounding on the front door, the electric power at their Altadena home had been out for hours, and they were huddled around a flashlight doing a puzzle. Their neighbors shouted they needed to leave — now.
Graham Fortier and his wife buckled his two daughters, Abigail, 5, and Emilia, 3, into their car seats, while massive flames engulfed the mountain behind their home. Abigail requested music. As the family raced down the hill, branches and wind pummeling their car, the song 'Best Day Ever' from the cartoon 'SuperKitties' blared over the speakers.
Fortier hoped the music would distract them. It didn't. The girls knew what was happening, 'much more than you'd imagine,' he said.
Early the next morning, safe at a friend's house in Burbank, the family learned that their home had burned to the ground. That day, the girls became 'extra irritable,' melting down in frequent tantrums and clinging tightly to their parents.
'Both of them have lost pretty much everything they derived comfort from,' Fortier said.
While adult fire victims can be better equipped to process and act on stressful circumstances in rational ways — assessing financial losses, planning next steps, wading through paperwork — children are more likely to express their grief and fear with raw emotion and behavioral regressions.
In the two months since the fires, children have been are experiencing meltdowns, sleep issues and separation anxiety. For the youngest fire victims, this can include returning to earlier stages in their development, said Gregory Leskin, a psychologist and program director with the National Child Traumatic Stress Network at UCLA.
The traumatic toll of the fires on the L.A region's children cannot be underestimated and may portend long-term difficulties, child development experts say.
'We need to make sure there are services and programs at nine months and a year. A lot of the world will have forgotten what happened, but these kids will not,' said Jennifer R. Levin, an L.A.-based therapist and traumatic grief expert. 'We can't think this is going to be over with and not be prepared.'
The Fortier girls are still struggling.
Abigail, who is neurodivergent and has ADHD, had been making progress at school. But now she's back to having frequent meltdowns, which can include hitting, yelling and slamming doors. Little Emilia — who also lost her preschool in the fire — 'is just very angry, but she can't fully process what happened,' Fortier said. The girls just want to go home.
Other parents said their children have been having potty accidents again, speaking in baby talk or gibberish, sleeping in their parents' bed and throwing tantrums over small changes in routines.
Although children can show remarkable resilience and even grow from tragic events, Leskin said, some might seem fine at first and then start showing signs of trauma weeks or months after the fires. The behavioral changes also extend to older children, who may withdraw or begin acting out at school.
'I've got teenagers sleeping in bed with parents,' Levin said. 'With a trauma of this magnitude, you're definitely going to get regressions, and you're going to see problems you've dealt with in the past resurface.'
For the youngest children, who do not yet have the words or emotional development to express their grief, the response to the fires can be more unconscious and physical.
Since they evacuated from the flames, Kyle Massie says, his 5-year-old son at times seems to have 'almost reverted back to a toddler.' Their home survived, but the trauma of the day has remained.
A previously talkative child, the boy has started sometimes speaking in a 'minion language.' When Massie asks him a question, his son responds several times in gibberish before finally answering in a language his dad can understand.
His son also had a bathroom accident at school for the first time in two years. 'I almost feel like there are these unconscious regressions,' Massie said. 'He was really shook and upset by it.'
Saben Taylor, 5, and his sister, Wawona Hsiao, 3, have been experiencing heightened separation anxiety since their scary midnight evacuation through the smoke. Their Altadena home didn't burn, but they haven't been able to move back, and they were displaced from their school.
'Saben has been having a pretty rough time with goodbyes,' said his mother, Linda Hsiao. He now hugs his friends every time he sees them, tells them he loves them and asks, ' 'How many days until I get to see you again.'I can feel his fear of losing his friends and community.'
Wawona has been trying to stick as close as possible to her mother, tapping on her chest for comfort, even though she no longer breastfeeds. She's also taken to wearing pajamas to school, telling her mother, 'I just want to feel cozy.' And since the fire, the whole family is sleeping in one bed.
It's very normal for young children to regress after a traumatic experience as a way to 'feel safe, adapt and return to times in their lives that they may have felt a sense of security,' Leskin said. Regressing can offer a 'respite from the stress that they're feeling.'
For older children, processing the trauma of the fires can be much more vivid.
Clover, 9, and Henry, 7, sit at the dining room table of the friend's house where the Bull-Gehling family is currently staying — their sixth stop since they lost their house in the Eaton fire.
Henry pages through the binder of Pokemon cards he grabbed as the family evacuated, along with his blanket. Clover scooped up a few stuffed animals, but can't stop thinking about the one they left behind: Caravaggio the lamb, their first stuffy.
'The anxiety doesn't feel good when I go to sleep,' said Clover, who uses they/them pronouns. 'I imagine what it would be like to be my favorite stuffed animal, Caravaggio, and the fires coming and reaching her.'
Clover also sometimes dreams about what their pet fish might have felt when the flames engulfed its glass bowl.
Clover described a crushing feeling of pressure since the fire, often making it difficult to breathe. It feels 'like there's a rock falling on me, and I have nothing to do about it,' Clover said. 'It feels like I don't have any oxygen left, and I'm an astronaut. ... It feels like the air gets thinner.'
One day, Clover asked 'if it was possible to die of sadness,' said their mom, Elizabeth Bull.
Nearly two months after the fires, Clover is drawing picture after picture of their old house.
Henry said he's also feeling 'really sad' but tries to hide it. 'I don't really cry. It's like I'm crying inside, but I'm not showing it,' he said. 'I'm just trying to stay calm.'
The kids have a 'band' with their cousins called Los Primos with no instruments but plenty of singing. Clover and Henry wrote a series of songs about tragedies that they hope to sing with their cousins: 'Earthquake,' 'Avalanche' and one simply called 'Disaster.'
Although the songs might sound dark, expressing themselves through music and art is a real strength as children seek to heal, Leskin said.
Children tend to have intense emotions, but only some are able to express them, Levin said. And while an adult tends to stay in 'a constant heaviness of grief,' children tend to move 'in and out of intense feelings,' sad one minute and then ready to play with their friends the next.
That's certainly been the case for Clover and Henry, their mom said. While they go through moments of intense feeling, they're 'still kids able to have fun. They still love ice cream, laughing with their friends, watching movies and playing soccer,' Bull said.
Lara Choulakian, who manages one of the two mental health programs at Pasadena Unified School District, said all of the students in the district have been affected by the fire. Students' reactions, however, vary greatly depending on whether they lost a home or school, as well as their age, developmental level and past experiences with trauma and loss.
Many have told the school counselors about anxiety, sleep disturbances and replaying the moments of the fire over and over again in their head. With younger children, separation anxiety is common. With the older elementary students, the counselors hear a lot of questions about death and loss.
Choulakian said the counselors are focused on normalizing the children's feelings and giving them coping tools such as deep breathing, progressive muscle relaxation and identifying the things that make them happy.
With help from supportive adults, most children will eventually return to their previous level of functioning. By six months after a traumatic event, Leskin said, the stress levels of most children will be markedly reduced.
But not always.
Justina Acevedo-Cross, senior director of community strategy at the Hawaii Community Foundation, which funds early childhood initiatives on the islands, said that even 18 months after wildfire destroyed Lahaina, teachers and child-care providers are still seeing behavioral issues.
'Even the little bodies of infants remember the fire, or maybe the fear of their family members, or evacuating. It's held in the body and can show up later,' she said. High winds blowing on Maui still 'stop some kids in their tracks at school.' A school bell can retrigger their trauma, she said, a reminder of siren warnings.
'There's still a lot of healing to do,' Acevedo-Cross said. 'The more we can continue to normalize that feelings can come up at any time, and you weren't only supposed to have those feelings in the first month after the fire, that's a really important role.'
Levin founded a company called Traumatic Grief Solutions that works with schools and businesses to prepare for the long-term impact of the L.A.-area fires. She said schools are likely to continue to see children acting out for many months to come, including withdrawal, problems on the playground and, for teenagers, more substance abuse.
Colette Liu Tervalon, 9, lost not only her home but also her beloved husky, Jon Snow, in the Eaton fire.
An artist, she's been drawing picture after picture of dogs since then, or images of headstones that say, 'Jan. 8 RIP Jon Snow I love you,' and collecting small plastic husky figurines.
'I wasn't sad about the house. I was sad about my pet, my friend,' she said while eating a bowl of ramen noodles at the table of her family's new rental. She described the experience as 'losing a family member.'
It's the only thing Colette wants to talk about. Asked about a recent visit to the charred remains of her house, she replied, 'The weird thing is, John Snow didn't survive, but Jon Snow's ball survived. It had some ash on it. ... One of my favorite memories was me jumping on Jon Snow's back and riding on him in the pool.'
Colette hasn't been sleeping well recently, her mother, Jinghuan Liu Tervalon, said, and she's been dozing off in class. Once a social and happy child, Colette has been opting to stay home from school and avoid playing with kids in her new neighborhood.
Colette has intense emotions and a mature level of understanding of what took place, Leskin said. She's struggling to make sense of what happened and why. The loss of a pet can deepen the sense of loss for a child, he added, because that pet would have been an important comfort in dealing with the trauma of losing her house.
'These are definitely grief behaviors that she is showing,' Levin said, and the multiple losses of both dog and house are cumulative. 'You have loss on top of loss, and it's just one big, giant loss.'
For many children, the loss of a school can also be traumatic.
Jon Cross, 8, attended Odyssey North. And although his house still stands, the loss of his school has had a profound effect on his ability to function. Jon, who has autism and ADHD, is in the second grade but has difficulty learning and reads at a kindergarten level.
He was thriving at Odyssey with the help of a one-on-one aide whom he loved. But after the fire, when the school relocated to a Boys & Girls Club — where his class shares a giant room with several other classes — the environment became too chaotic. He spent six weeks out of school before switching to another elementary school in La Cañada Flintridge.
'Change is hard for everyone, adults included, but for autistic children even more,' said his mother, Jamie Morgan Cross. Since the fires, his anxiety — something he was already dealing with — has become much worse. Without the predictable structure of school, he kept asking Cross, 'What's next? What's next? What's next?'
Eventually, he started playing pretend school with his dolls, walking them each morning through their routine: reading, recess, writing, lunch. For children with developmental disabilities, it's especially critical to help them retain a sense of order and physical structure, Leskin said.
As they fled their home, speeding down the hill through the wind and flying debris, Cassie Manjikian said, her 5-year-old twins were screaming, 'We're going to die.'
'The whole night was really traumatizing for everyone,' she said. Her 8-year-old was glued to the Watch Duty app for weeks.
'They just had so many questions,' Manjikian said. So she made a comic book story for them to help them understand and process their emotions, called 'The Big Scary Fire and the Bonus Vacation.'
They read it every night before beds for weeks, until the kids finally stopped requesting it — a strategy Leskin described as a creative type of exposure therapy, which can reduce the stress associated with the traumatic memories of the fire.
Shawn Maestretti and his family helped their 8-year-old son, Porter, heal from the loss of their home by offering to have him reimagine their new house by building it with a set of Lego bricks, creating a sense of play and adventure.
'I've been amazed by how resilient Porter has been and how resilient children naturally are,' Maestretti said. 'It depends so much on how parents process it.'
Parents can play an important role in helping their children process trauma and begin to heal. And often, this begins with allowing a child to talk through what happened in an age-appropriate way, and reminding them that they are safe and secure with their family now.
For younger kids, this can include encouraging play, art and storytelling with toys and dolls, Leskin said. For older children, a journal can be a useful tool.
Leskin suggests rebuilding family routines as much as possible, including regular meal and bedtimes, to help regain the sense of control that has been lost.
And because children take their cues from parents, he says, it's crucial for adults to work through their own traumas. 'If a child senses parent's a anxiety or worry, they will pick up on it and can absorb and reflect those worries.'
Scheduling fun events for the family to look forward to together can also be healing. 'You have to distract yourself. You cannot allow yourself to be in this 24/7,' Levin said.
This article is part of The Times' early childhood education initiative, focusing on the learning and development of California children from birth to age 5. For more information about the initiative and its philanthropic funders, go to latimes.com/earlyed.