Hello and welcome to a special edition of Your South Florida.

I'm Pam Giganti.

Gun violence and mass shootings have become an unsettling trend in America.

As of this taping, there have already been 251 mass shootings this year alone.

In May, a mass shooting at a Buffalo, New York supermarket took the lives of 10 people.

Just 10 days later, came another mass shooting, this time at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, which claimed the lives of 19 students and two teachers.

It marked the 27th school shooting this year and the deadliest school shooting since Sandy Hook in 2012.

As lawmakers and leaders grapple with how to stop these shootings from happening again, parents, teachers, and loved ones have been left to deal with the fear and the uncertainty these traumatic events have on children.

Parents in particular are struggling to find the tools to tackle these difficult conversations with their kids, concerned about the stress and the mental anguish that could be developing in their child.

Tonight, in partnership with HITN, we gathered local mental health experts, parents, and high school students to discuss the psychological impacts on children and teens, and to offer some tips on how to talk with kids about gun violence.

Joining me to discuss this and more is Dr. Ana Pando, a children and family licensed therapist and director of A Shared Vision Psychotherapy, and Lina Acosta Sandaal, child and adolescent development expert and psychotherapist and founder of Stop Parenting Alone.

Thank you both so much for being with us tonight.

All right, Lina, let me start with you.

How does a parent or a guardian start this delicate conversation with their child about how they're reacting to or how they feel about gun violence?

I always like to tell parents to remember to connect and then correct.

So the first way to speak about difficult things is to gently be with them, right?

Ask questions first, get clarity on what they've heard, what they understand, that way you say enough and not too much.

But most importantly, be with them.

You know, a lot of us, as parents, we like to quickly get to the solution or them feeling calm, but sometimes we need somebody to just sit with us.

And I would imagine that those conversations have to be age appropriate, right?

So where do parents start if you're talking to a five-year-old versus your 12-year-old?

Well, with the little ones, I think what's most important is to see what's in the environment.

A lot of us get into the habit of keeping 24 hour news on, you know, even in restaurants, we have that.

So for the little ones, I would say it's less about what you're saying and more what they're exposed to.

Now, anyone five, eight, 10, and older, it is about meeting them where they're at.

For elementary school children, I would say ask them, "Hey, what have you heard?"

And for the adolescents, be respectful, you know?

Sit with them and say, "Hey, what have you thought about this?

What do you think could be changed?

How do you think things can happen?"

So with the littles, it's still a question but with information, with the adolescents, it's about being curious about what they know.

Dr. Pando, talk about parents and the anxiety that parents are going through.

We're watching these images.

We're shocked to see all of this happening all over again, especially here in South Florida, after what happened with Parkland.

Parents are on edge.

Mm hmm and what they do is whatever happens in Parkland affects us and whatever happens, because of the media, we're all interconnected.

And so the parents that feel the grief, we feel grief also.

And we also feel the anxiety.

So we have to be able to tell our children, "Yes, I'm anxious.

Yes, I'm worried.

But I'm gonna do everything as well as I can to be able to get you to continue to go to school."

So there's a problem with that.

There are some kids who don't wanna go to school now.

[pam] Yeah, so how do we deal with that?

Lina, how do you deal with a child?

I'm sure you have.

You've probably had patients that they don't wanna go back to school, they're afraid.

So first, understand what the fear is about.

But I say this also, we cannot fix the mind with what the mind created.

So what do I mean?

We have to dip into the body.

Anxiety lives inside of our body.

And a lot of the time, we're trying to talk at someone so that they calm down.

So when a child or a teenager or an adult is overstimulated, anxiety is about our nervous system getting overstimulated, it's more about, "Hey, let's take a moment to calm down how your heart beating fast and your shoulders getting tight.

Let's drink some water.

And then we can think about whether or not we're going to school," right?

We try to get into the logic before we get into calming down the body.

Dr. Pando, talk about the wounds, maybe, being opened up again.

You know, we were referencing Parkland.

So many of us in this community either knew somebody, or even if we didn't, you saw those images, we all felt it no matter where you lived in this region.

So there are perhaps some wounds that have been reopened because of what we just saw in Uvalde, Texas.

How do you deal with that?

It's taking you back to step one.

It goes back to creating that wound and you're putting lemon on it now by having this happen again.

So the resurgence of other people's grief affects the grief that you've been hopefully healing through.

There's a lot of healing to be done, not only at Parkland, but now with all these other schools that are having difficulty with this.

Yeah and let's talk a little bit about images and what we see and how that affects our mind, how we feel, our breathing.

Lina, you were just talking about that, "Have a glass of water, calm down."

You can't get away from it.

We have social media all around us.

I mean, we've all been even to restaurants and seen kids start playing with their iPads when they're little.

The technology's part of our lives so we can't, we have to learn to live with it, right?

But how do we, as parents, caregivers, teachers, deal with the effects of social media and those images that kids are seeing that are violent images, or they're seeing guns, or they're seeing kids running or afraid?

Well, I think that a lot of the time we feel like we can't control it, but that's not true, right?

A screen is, I want everybody to think of the screen as a book, not a pacifier.

And I think that that's the biggest problem that we currently have, right?

And I get it, it's so easy to just hand over a screen when you have to work, when you have to eat, when you have to get somebody to school quickly, right?

However, I think that we have to have more, we have to do the screen with rather than hand it over.

So if I am there and I am sitting with you and you see something scary, right?

We can talk about it, and that's for the littles, right?

And also anticipate it.

"If you see something that you don't understand, buddy, you could turn it off and give it to me."

A lot of the times children see something scary and they don't give it to us 'cause they're afraid that they did something wrong.

We have to predict for them that that scary image is in there.

Now, with our adolescents, one more time, I will say this time and again, let's respect them and let's sit with them and wonder, "Hey, show me what you're seeing.

Tell me what you think."

With adolescents, it's a lot about curiosity and having an open dialogue.

So often, parents get so scared that they're talking at teens rather than with teens.

Dr. Pando, I see you, you're nodding.

Talk about that.

I have three grown children and I remember just, there's a delicate balance about, look, they go into their bedroom, they have their phones.

They could be looking at we don't know what, right?

Hopefully they're making the right choices.

[ana] Yeah, we hope.

We hope, yeah.

So talk about that and what kind of conversations should parents be having?

It starts way before when you get to adolescence, it starts very, very young when we decide as parents, how much time should they spend on media and how much time should they not?

How much time do they have to interact with the family?

It's not a child problem alone.

It's a family problem.

It's a parental problem because we're afraid to set limits.

We expect the pacifier to take care of things.

And parents don't have the time to sit there and talk to them about, "Tell me if you see something scary."

Are you kidding?

They're not gonna tell you if they're scared, if something's scary, they're gonna tell their friends that they saw something scary so they can go ahead and keep talking about that.

So it's removal of a lot of media and having time limits.

And I know they hate me for this every time I say it, yeah, but- But you're saying put these limits even on your teens.

Yeah, even the little ones.

Everybody.

Everybody, including the parents.

Including you.

We're saying the same thing at the same time.

You two are in agreement on that.

Yeah.

[pam] We have parents here.

I wanna bring in the parents.

And one of our parents here is a Elias.

Elias, I want you to talk to us about how you feel regarding the images that your child is seeing.

So tell us about your child or children, their ages, and how you are dealing with social media and the images that they're consuming.

Hi, thank you.

I'm a father of four children.

I have a 20-year-old, an 18-year-old, an 11-year-old and a three-year-old.

And one of my big concerns is always the access that they have to unfiltered and oftentimes mislabeled content, you know, content that they access that seems to be age appropriate for their group, and then in the middle of the video, for example, on YouTube, then another type of content comes in.

And so it's hard to predict when there's going to be a deviation of the content that's actually labeled on the video description.

And you know, most of the time you don't have, you're not constantly supervising your children when they have access to social media.

So it's very important for us, in our case, to stay within earshot and try to monitor what they're listening to or what they're viewing and to be able to take that preemptive step and say, "Hey, well, let's do something else now."

[pam] So you are having those conversations with your children about appropriate content.

[elias] Correct.

Okay, thank you so much.

You're welcome.

Doctors, that's a lot for a parent.

Four kids and you gotta be always monitoring and listening in earshot of what's going on.

Well, I have a lot of parents remove the door.

Remove the door from your room.

If your child's gonna be in there, you need to know what's going on.

And I agree with you, Elias.

The thing is, is that as much as you try to supervise them, in a second, they could switch or something else comes in.

I've had children who are looking at fights, wrestling fights, and all of a sudden something pops in that's porn.

And you can't, you're not gonna tell the child, "Oh, if you see porn," they don't even know what porn is.

[pam] Yeah, and once they've seen it, you can't- And then you can't retrieve it, so you have to say, you have to, there are a lot of ways to go into their computers and into their phones.

And a lot of parents don't do this, that they can go ahead and censor all of that from coming in to begin with.

I have too many kids that are pre-adolescents looking at porn.

They shouldn't be doing that.

Yeah, thank you, Doctor.

Well, the majority of public schools in the US hold active shooter drills, but do they actually make kids feel safer?

PBS NewsHour reached out to their national network of young reporters as part of their student reporting labs to ask their fellow students what adults should know about growing up in this era of school shootings.

Take a look.

We had a fire alarm, Monday, go off and there were two girls in front of me and they just asked, "What if this isn't a drill?"

And we all knew they weren't talking about a fire.

Kids in America don't hear a fire alarm and fear fire.

They fear a shooter.

They fear that it's a trap that they're walking into.

It makes you kind of grow up really fast in terms of like coming to terms with your mortality, which is something someone my age I don't think needs to do right away.

I feel like I shouldn't have to be like every morning, "Okay, this could be it for me.

I could die today."

I think about where the best place to go in a classroom would be, I think about what classrooms are the worst to be in.

And it's damaging to anybody's, really, mental health to have to worry about that.

Students and teachers.

I feel like teens nowadays feel like it's cool to play with guns and kind of have it in their videos.

So I think guns are being promoted in a way to look cool on social media, in which I think that right there is already a big red flag because no children should be having any guns in their hands.

I'd like to say that it affects us greatly, but the unfortunate reality is I think we've mostly gone really numb to them.

They just happens so often, you see them in the news all the time.

It no longer really has that much of an impact on us anymore.

But the Parkland shooting, I remember feeling a little disconnected in like a "Oh, it can never happen to me" kind of way.

Like it's awful that it's happening to these people, but I don't think it'll ever happen to me.

And then it happened in Oxford and I was like, "Oh my God, this could happen to me."

Like that was 20 minutes from where we live.

At my own school, we had a smaller shooting and everyone was just really silent for the whole week.

And we canceled school.

You could tell everyone was on edge.

And it was really traumatic, if I'm being honest.

It's a cycle of helplessness that we can't really get out of and it just needs to stop.

A little bit tough to watch.

You can see that some of these students are really suffering with what's going on with some of these lockdowns and these drills.

We have some students here in our audience and I wanna address the first question to Sophie.

Talk a little bit about what you just watched.

What touched you and do you do that at your school?

Do you have those lockdown drills and how do they make you feel?

So I've been in the public school education system since, or for the past 13 years.

And you can definitely see the progression in how these drills have progressed throughout the years ever since these mass shootings have become more and more prevalent.

And the only alternative we have now is hiding in a corner and wishing for the best.

And obviously, everyone in our, like whenever we have these drills, none of us are secure in those protocols just because it's really unsafe.

And like establishing these type of drills is not really safe for us and we don't feel safe in those type of situations.

And like what the lady in the video said about it being so close to home, we were 20 minutes away from Parkland, the Parkland shooting, and it definitely hit for us.

And it does give those feelings of hopelessness and fear because we're so close and it could, you don't think it could happen to you, you have that mindset that like, it could never happen to me until it happens that close to you.

And we were in middle school when it happened, so spending the rest of high school with the, like, thinking that it could happen at any given moment is frightening.

Yeah, no, of course.

Angelique, I wanna bring you into the conversation.

There was a student in the program that talked about when you hear the fire drill that you automatically think is this really a fire drill or is this a shooter?

You don't think it's a fire, you think it's a shooter.

Have you experienced anything like that?

I have experienced something like that because of the Parkland shooting.

That's exactly what happened.

There was a fire drill and a code red at the same time and they didn't know which one to follow, which is why it caused so many victims to why there was so many victims.

So when there's a fire drill at my school and there's no, really, a say whether it's a drill or not, that thought always passes through my mind.

[pam] Yeah.

And Mateo, how did you feel listening to those students?

Do you echo some of their thoughts as well?

Yeah, you know, I really resonated with that one kid who said that he felt numb to it because I feel like that feeling of helplessness eventually transforms into a feeling of numbness.

It's like your brain does that to kind of cope with what's happening, like automatically, just 'cause you don't want to think about it.

You don't want to think that it could happen to you, your friends, your community.

It's a really scary thing to just kind of have weighing over you at any given point.

[pam] Yeah, no for sure.

We have a couple of teachers joining us as well and Natalie Birriel is with us.

Natalie, talk about your feelings after watching that and what some of your own students have told you and tell us what grades that you teach.

Well, thank you so much for having me.

I teach fifth through eighth grade and my feeling of watching this has been incredibly sad.

Students deserve the right to be able to learn in peace.

It is hard enough to go to school.

I remember when Columbine happened, I was getting a smoothie, as most of us do in South Florida, at 3:15 when the first shots rang out and the next day we were all issued IDs.

And that was the first big shift.

And that happened almost 20 years ago.

The fact that students are so heavily tested in this country, the weight of state exams always looms over, the reality of will I get into a good school, a good high school, a good college?

Are my parents going through a divorce?

Are we poor?

Are we rich?

Can I afford the shoes?

There's so many other anxieties that go through students' minds every day that the fact that my students have anxiety over if a door is closing or not, the fact that my kids cannot sit to read, let alone take a test when something like this occurs.

This is not right and this needs to change.

Michelle, do you wanna chime in on that and do, how do your students feel when you're doing, having these drills?

Well, I'm at the opposite end.

I have a preschool background.

So even with preschool students, it's something that is important, I feel, is really, really important.

And it does make me, as an educator, feel safe and it helps me make the parents feel safe as well.

But it's really important to me.

It was really important to have those drills in place and have it on a monthly basis like it should be, just because you never do know when it could happen and to have the children be comfortable with that and not freeze, not panic.

It's very important because if it does happen for real, they need to be able to understand what's going on and keep calm.

Not only for the kids, but for the teachers that are taking care of them.

We're responsible for these children.

And it's a lot, it's a lot on our shoulders.

But only through doing this, we could understand where there's an opportunity to improve.

And actually, when the Parkland shooting happened, it was an eye opener for me just to take a closer look to the school and the infrastructure and where are the doors and where are the windows and what do we do.

And I'm sad that you don't feel safe during the drills.

I know it could be a nuisance, but it's really the only way that we have to try to make things better.

And also, on the educator side and on the board of the school's parent teacher association, a lot is getting done behind the scenes to keep you safe.

So we just need to make it better.

We definitely need to make it better.

Lina, talk about that.

How can, and we just heard from Michelle, the drills need to happen and the kids need to feel comfortable.

So kind of walk us through, I mean, we live in a society today where even though the kids feel anxious, the drills still need to happen.

People still need to have a plan in place, right?

So how do we make everybody not feel so anxious?

So keep a stance of acceptance and Yes, And.

So first, accept that it's scary, right?

The natural human response to going through a drill, right?

That a scary person might come in and hurt us is to be scared.

So Yes, And means "Yes, baby, of course you're scared," or "Yes, it's true," right?

The first thing that I wanted to say to all the students was like, yes, you're right, it isn't fair.

And let's think about what we're doing that we can control, right?

So I think a lot of the time we're like, "No, no, no, don't worry.

Don't, oh, that silly drill" or we try to ignore it or avoid it, but no, we have to say, "Yes, this is scary and we're getting through it and what can you control?

What can't you control?"

That's really the best stance for fear and for anxiety.

[pam] Yeah.

Dr. Pando, let's talk about what you can control and also what we have seen with the school shootings is a lot of times, sadly, it's a former student who has having, obviously, some sort of mental health issue, a breakdown.

What kinds of red flag things can students, can the teachers be looking for?

And then what do they do with that information?

Let me emphasize, some of the middle school and high school students that I interviewed in my private practice, they told me that a lot of the information that these shooters get is on the internet.

And a lot of them also see, when they walk by one of the students, if he's trying to buy guns or if he's really interested in guns, they know then to go to a counselor in the school or they know enough to go to the assistant principal or principal and talk to them about it.

But students are very afraid to go and snitch on somebody, because if you snitch on another student, then you become a target.

So it's a very delicate situation where we have to provide confidentiality, that if a child comes up to us, we have to promise them that we will keep their information at the school and then work with that student.

Did you have something you wanted to say?

Okay, yeah.

Let's turn to one of the parents.

Go ahead and tell us your name.

My name is Angela and I love to be here and be talking about this and making more awareness from all the different angles, because it opens up our eyes to see and understand what needs to happen, how do we feel, and how the kids feel and the adults, 'cause they're almost adults too.

In my experience with what you're saying, I have a 10-year-old boy who's in fourth grade going to fifth grade.

And just last week we had an experience when one of his friends, these are kids, they're 10.

One of his friends got kicked out of school, but my son would not tell me about this until the kid left the school because he was so afraid.

The kid had been coming around with situations with the teachers and they've been writing the kid up and so forth.

But we're talking about 10-year-old, just feeling this fear of violence by another 10-year-old and not feeling that he had the, this snitching situation that you're talking about is he feels that he was gonna snitch and if he snitched, the kid might do something to him.

The kids said, "I'm gonna kill you."

So we're talking about 10, and I guess my concern also is what are we doing?

We take this kid out of school, what else will be in place for this child, who could, in turn, if this is not taken care of, become the next shooter?

So I believe there's like this loop on where do we begin and where does it end.

What needs to be in place?

And also what's the conversation with my 10-year-old who doesn't have this feeling about the drills because he's 10, because we don't expose him to the news.

He has 20-year-old brother and sister, so he's not like a 10-naive-year-old.

He's snappy and he knows.

How do we talk to them about the snitching, the violent conversation with the friend, their fear of not telling anything until the kid is removed, and the drill that didn't happen because it was a shooting the day before?

So how do we expose them to this you need to take care of yourself, but we don't want them to set the alarms so much that they become really afraid of the drills.

[pam] Yeah, no, that's a really good point.

Both of you have worked within the school system as well.

So talk about that, 'cause that seems like that's a school system issue.

This boy was removed, are his needs being taken care of?

I think that that's, you know, whenever we hit these big topics and these scary topics, there's what happens in the micro level, which is parent, child, in our home, and then what happens in the macro level, right?

So the system currently, in my opinion, is broken, right?

We are budgeting in, you know, everybody talks about the budget, right?

The school budget, the school budget, the school budget.

In particular for public and charter schools.

And, you know, we really have to take a look at where are we spending the money, because, and I want the community to understand that it is our leaders in Tallahassee that decide where we're spending the money.

And that's a whole other show.

And that's a whole other show, right?

But for us, as it pertains to understanding, I think currently we have the idea that, like, let's put 'em aside and put 'em in this other school and then they're gonna get help.

And if that's the case, then let's fund that school.

Dr. Pando, I'm gonna give you the last word.

Just advice for parents on how to help their children handle anxiety and fear.

Work with them as to how to do breathing exercises, how to do a lot of meditation exercises that are, there are apps.

For those that don't believe in meditation, sit with them and listen to music, whatever music they feel calms them down and soothes them.

It's not always our music, it might be their music.

Open the doors to communication, it's very important.

And make sure that we don't judge that boy or that other boy, we just say, "Just come to me with whatever information you have and I promise you, I'm not gonna squeal on you.

I promise you I'm not gonna tell your school unless it's something that puts you and other students in danger."

Yes, thank you both so much for being here.

Thank you to our students, our teachers, our parents.

We really appreciate this great and important conversation.

That's all the time we have for tonight's town hall.

And I'd like to thank, again, our panel of experts and our audience.

We really appreciate you being here.

We are going to put some local mental health resources on our social media, @YourSouthFL.

I'm Pam Giganti.

As always, stay safe and thank you for watching.