How do you help children cope with a life-threatening incident? And what if you're stressed yourself? Katy Gosset looks at the far reaching emotional effects of the Canterbury earthquakes.

How do you help children cope with a life-threatening incident? And what if you're stressed yourself?

Katy Gosset looks at the far-reaching emotional effects of the Canterbury earthquakes.

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It's been ten years.

And yet when the earth shifts even just a little bit, 11-year-old Ella* still freezes.

"She panics. You see every part of her tense and she doesn't say anything."

"She goes quiet, but you can just see the fear, the absolute fear in her eyes," her mother, Amelia* said.

The magnitude 7.1 earthquake on September 4 2010 began a series of tremors that dogged the Canterbury region.

The most prominent: a 6.2 quake on February 22 2011 that claimed 185 lives.

Ella was almost two when it all began and seemed initially unfazed but, as time went on, the anxiety began to emerge.

Amelia recalled her daughter's reaction during the Valentine's Day quake in February 2016.

"I looked at her and she went white. She froze and she said, 'I want to be sick.'"

It's a similar story for Margaret whose four daughters all struggled to cope with the ongoing earthquake sequence.

"They were quite traumatised. Being a massive earthquake it was quite scary and it took a long time to settle down."

So much so that, even a decade on, reactions remain acute.

"They're quite fragile around them. They don't even like you mentioning the earthquakes."

"They're older but I noticed that the other day when we had that earthquake, I still gave my 18-year-old a cuddle because she was actually physically shaking. So it's still there by a long way."

The girls are part of a cohort of Christchurch children who've grown up amidst constant aftershocks and life changes.

When Christchurch clinical psychologist Catherine Gallagher takes a developmental history from a new client, a chat about the quakes is now standard procedure.

"Talking about their responses to the earthquake and what's happened for them and their families has become just part of that conversation."

Gallagher has seen numerous children affected by the quakes and even ten years on, they are still presenting with related issues.

"It might have become more, over time, just a diffuse sense of not feeling quite settled and safe. …

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details