'Sick of holding my breath': Parents nationwide wrestle with fear of school shootings

A day after a mass shooting at a Georgia high school, a wave of familiar dread set in for parents across the country as they prepared for another school day.

A Florida mom texted her 15-year-old “I love you” Thursday morning after he and his younger brother rode off on bikes to school. A mom in Georgia emailed her fourth-grader’s principal because she knew it would make her feel better. In South Carolina, a 12-year-old broke into tears after her mother, a gun control advocate, told her about the two students and two teachers who'd been fatally shot at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia.

Their experiences in 24 hours, from coast to coast, capture some of the harsh realities of parenting in the United States as school shootings continue to plague campuses where families entrust their most vulnerable loved ones. Each time a new tragedy grips the country, parents contend with a renewed sense of foreboding about sending their children into school environments many feel can’t guarantee their safety. How to cope with those feelings – of anxiety, fear and helplessness – is something every parent approaches differently.

“The best thing I can do is manage my own emotions,” said Crystal Garrant, the mom of a fourth-grader in Atlanta, Georgia, who also works for the gun violence prevention group Sandy Hook Promise.

Garrant’s heightened angst, and that of many parents this week, is backed up by data : School shootings are up by 31% across the U.S., according to the latest data from the nonprofit Everytown for Gun Safety and David Riedman, founder of the K-12 School Shooting Database.

The frequency of gun violence in American schools has altered the way their kids’ campuses look and feel. Active shooter drills are part of the back-to-school season. Schools have bolstered security in recent years. Most teachers worry about shootings, surveys show . And some educators are now armed with guns.

How the shooting unfolded: See the complete timeline of events

For some parents, school drop off is ‘petrifying’

On the second day of the school year in Charlotte, North Carolina, Taylor Maxwell dropped off her 3-year-old at the preschool where her daughter has participated in lockdown drills since she was 2. Educators there teach the young kids to sit still and be quiet – a concept they’re still grasping as preschoolers.

Sending her daughter to school the day after a shooting in the South – where more people are gun owners than in other parts of the country, according to a survey from the Pew Research Center – was “a little terrifying,” Maxwell said.

“It’s really overwhelming to have someone so tiny who you love so much in a world that is really petrifying as a parent,” she said.

Maxwell works with Project Unloaded, an organization that collaborates with teens to create social media campaigns about gun prevention. She said many parents think “it will never be their kids who do something dangerous with a gun” in their home. Yet she hopes that fewer parents take the chance and that the shooting in Georgia inspires them to secure their firearms properly or to not own them at all.

Read more: Colt Gray, 14, identified as suspect in Apalachee High School shooting: What we know

Past shootings loom over parenting choices

Monica Garcia couldn’t help but feel stressed when she dropped off her 6-year-old daughter Isabella at school Thursday morning. After news of the shooting in Georgia, she felt “devastated,” “scared” and “highly anxious.”

Garcia, who lives in Texas where a gunman slaughtered 19 students and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde in 2022, said it’s been painful to see violence happening so regularly in schools, a place where children should feel safe.

When her 28-year-old son Christian was a student, Garcia, of Richmond, Texas, said she never worried about school shootings. When selecting an elementary school for her daughter, Garcia and her wife ultimately chose a private Montessori school over a public school, in part because of the stricter safety protocols.

“There’s a sense of anxiousness, but also I trust this school, I trust these teachers, I trust these women that they would do everything to protect my kid,” Garcia said.

Good communication within the family, she said, has also been key to helping her cope with the fear, including finding an age-appropriate way to explain to her daughter why her school holds intruder drills.

“We have a lot of contingency plans,” she said. “And we talk it out and we cry.”

Dr. Annie Andrews, a pediatrician in South Carolina and a senior advisor at Everytown for Gun Safety, said she typically tells her 12-year-old about mass school shootings. She made the choice to incorporate those conversations into her parenting after the Uvalde shooting. It would be best, she decided two years ago, for her children to learn about those tragedies from her first.

When she mentioned the killings at a Georgia high school Wednesday, her daughter burst into tears. The seventh grader’s school had held a prescheduled active shooter drill that same day, Andrews said, so the fear of a similar tragedy unfolding on her campus didn’t seem outside the realm of possibility.

“This is not healthy for developing brains,” Andrews said.

How should parents cope?

In the wake of a tragedy such as a school shooting, it’s “perfectly valid” for parents to feel sad or anxious, said Dr. Janine Domingues , a clinical psychologist at the Child Mind Institute in New York. But, Domingues said, it’s important that parents take time to regulate their own feelings about the event before they talk about it with their child.

“As not just a psychologist but as a parent, I totally understand the anxiety around hearing about these things,” she said. “It also is sad that we keep on having to have conversations, and it's something that we need to talk about.”

In the immediate aftermath of a violent event, she said it can be helpful to detach from media coverage and try simple coping mechanisms, such as taking deep breaths. Domingues said parents can also be proactive about learning the safety protocols at their children’s schools and getting involved in parent groups to ease anxiety about how the school would handle an emergency. She said it’s also important to remember that, although gun violence in schools has risen dramatically , mass shootings are rare.

Some parents opt to homeschool their kids over fears of mass shootings , but Domingues said parents should take a step back, assess their anxiety and talk with other people and parents before making major changes.

“Going to school, getting back in there, keeping to routine, things that you know – the predictability actually really helps ground kids in reducing any anxiety and worry,” she said.

Parents who want their kids to return to the classroom need to “get to a place where you can convey sincerely that you do want your child to go to school,” before speaking with their children, according to David Schonfeld, the director of the National Center for School Crisis and Bereavement at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. Schonfeld recommended parents be the ones to inform their kids about tragedies like school shootings, rather than letting them learn about such events from their peers or social media.

He said moments like these are opportunities to model how to cope with stressful news. “You can also and should communicate to kids that the news is unsettling and it did make you a little worried, but then talk about and focus on what you did to cope with the concern,” he said.

Parents fed up, worrying

Wednesday was supposed to be a special day for Katie Hathaway. It was her younger son’s 14th birthday. Her family enjoyed a nice dinner, but the mother of two in Neptune Beach, Florida, couldn’t steer her thoughts from the news out of Georgia.

Around 8:30 p.m., her 15-year-old son’s principal called to say security would be heightened at school on Thursday. The school had received an online threat, the principal said in a robocall, and although administrators ultimately deemed it not credible, the school would be on lockdown (but still hold classes) out of an abundance of caution.

Hathaway broke down crying. On top of the Georgia shooting, the update from her older son’s school left her overwhelmed and worried. After he and his brother departed on their bikes the next morning, she texted him that she loved him. There were cops everywhere, he texted back.

Like many moms, she is tired of wondering how her children could be traumatized by the fear of being gunned down at school.

“I’m sick of holding my breath,” she said.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 'Sick of holding my breath': Parents nationwide wrestle with fear of school shootings