ST. LOUIS _ Champale Greene-Anderson keeps the volume up on her television when she watches 5-year-old granddaughter Amor Robinson while the girl's mom is at work.
"So we won't hear the gunshots," Greene-Anderson said. "I have little bitty grandbabies, and I don't want them to be afraid to be here."
As a preschooler, Amor already knows and fears the sounds that occurred with regularity in their neighborhood before the pandemic _ and continue even now as the rest of the world has slowed down.
"I don't like the pop, pop noises," Amor explained, swinging the beads in her hair. "I can't hear my tablet when I watch something."
And when the television or her hot-pink headphones and matching tablet can't mask the noise of a shooting? "She usually stops everything," said her mother, Satin White. "Sometimes she cries, sometimes she covers her ears."
Her grandmother has even watched Amor hide inside a narrow gap between the couch and recliner.
In communities across the United States this spring, families are dealing with more than just the threat of the coronavirus outside their homes. In the midst of violence that does not stop even during a pandemic, children like Amor continually search for safety, peace and a quiet place. "Safer at Home" slogans don't guarantee safety for them.
More than two dozen parents and caregivers who spoke with Kaiser Health News attested that the kids hide underneath beds, in basements and dry bathtubs, waiting for gunfire to stop while their parents pray that a bullet never finds them.
In St. Louis, which has the nation's highest murder rate among cities with at least 100,000 people, the reasons are especially stark. More than 20 children in the St. Louis area were killed by gunfire last year, and this year at least 11 children have died already.
While some of the children's deaths were caused by accidental shootings inside a home, regular gunfire outside is a hurtful reminder that adults have to find ways to keep children safe. And while parents hope their kids grow into healthy adults, evidence shows that children who grow up around violence or witness it frequently are more likely to have health problems later in life.
Although the mental health of children around the world has been taxed these past few months, for some children the stress has been going on far longer. Regularly hearing shootings is one example of what's called an "adverse childhood experience." Americans who have adverse childhood experiences that remain unaddressed are more likely to suffer heart disease, cancer, chronic respiratory diseases and stroke, according to a 2019 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report.
St. Louis mental health counselor Lekesha Davis said children and their parents can become desensitized to the violence around them _ where even one's home doesn't feel safe. And, research shows, black parents and children in the U.S., especially, often cannot get the mental health treatment they may need because of bias or lack of cultural understanding from providers.
"Can you imagine as a child, you are sleeping, you know, no care in the world as you sleep and being jarred out of your sleep to get under the bed and hide?" Davis asked.
"We have to look at this, not just, you know, emotionally, but what does that do to our body?" she added. "Our brain is impacted by this fight-or-flight response. That's supposed to happen in rare instances, but when you're having them happen every single day, you're having these chemicals released in the brain on a daily basis. How does that affect you as you get older?"
But future health problems are hard to think about when you're trying to survive.
