TOKYO >> Some children are still suffering from stress-­related physical and mental issues more than eight months after the Noto Peninsula earthquake. That has some elementary schools in disaster-hit areas assigning children a special kind of homework: hugging family members.

“After the earthquake, she became sensitive to noise and scared even of small tremors,” a mother in Wajima, Ishikawa prefecture, said of her sixth grade daughter. Their house was destroyed in the earthquake.

In January, the Ishikawa board of education started a telephone consultation service to provide mental-health care for children, just after the quake hit the prefecture. Through the end of March, the service had received 109 calls, and by June’s end, a total of 907 counseling sessions had been provided to children. Currently, counselors are assigned mostly to elementary and junior high schools in the northern part of the peninsula.

Since February, Sanno Elementary School students in Nanao, Ishikawa prefecture, have been assigned the homework of hugging and holding hands with family members, and sitting on their parents’ laps. Kimiko Koura, a school nurse, came up with the idea after a survey in January showed that many children were traumatized. Some were unable to leave their parents’ side or became sick to their stomachs if they saw collapsed houses. Koura thought that close physical contact might help children feel safer.

While many students are still traumatized, more than 100 families said the approach has helped their children, and the initiative has been adopted or drawn interest from other disaster-hit areas.

Psychological trauma from earthquakes can have a lasting effect on children.

“Since children have difficulty expressing their feelings in words, many suffer from headaches or insomnia and begin complaining about such symptoms about six months after something has happened,” said Norihiko Kuwayama, a psychiatrist who treated children after the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami disaster. “It’s good for children to have physical contact when they start to feel insecure.”