098: Do school shooter trainings help (or hurt) children?

A few months ago a listener in my own home town reached out because a potentially incendiary device had been found on the elementary school property, and many parents were demanding disaster drill training in response.  The listener wanted to know whether there is any research on whether these drills are actually effective in preparing children for these situations, and whether it’s possible that they might actually cause psychological damage. In this episode we review the (scant) evidence available on drills themselves, and also take a broader look at the kinds of measures used in schools in the name of keeping our children safe – but which may actually have the opposite from intended effect. (#) Jen: 01:21 Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We have another serious topic to cover today and it's probably one that you don't want to listen to with children around. I received a question from listener Selena about 6 months ago saying that an incendiary device had been discovered on the grounds of the public school that my daughter would actually going to be attend if we weren't going to homeschool. And that some of the parents who were very worried and were demanding video surveillance and disaster preparedness drills and she wants to know whether there was any research available about the impacts of drills to prepare children for things like active shooters. And I wanted to know are these drills effective? And then when I started researching this issue, I went down a complete rabbit hole related to the effectiveness of other kinds of school security measures as well as bullying, as a potential cause of violence in schools. Jen: 02:08 And the kind of relational aggression that girls particularly to practice as well. So expect episodes on those topics soon in the coming months. But here to kick us off today on this mini series is Dr. Ben Fisher. He's Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at University of Louisville. Dr. Fisher’s research focuses on the