News spreads faster among kids than any virus.

So, odds are high that any child from elementary school on up has already heard about the latest coronavirus and its associated disease, COVID-19.

Two Catholic schools in Missouri’s St. Louis County have canceled classes after a father and daughter broke an in-home quarantine, issued by the local health department, to attend a dance at the Ritz-Carlton. The student’s older sister tested positive for COVID-19 after returning from Italy, and the whole family was instructed to remain at home for at least 14 days. (The family hired a lawyer, who said they had never been told to self-quarantine. County Executive Sam Page, and the health department, insist that they had.) In the wake of the news, other area schools sent emails asking students who may have been in contact with the younger daughter to stay at home.

Anger in the community is rampant, and rumors and anxiety will only intensify as the outbreak continues to spread.

In hard-hit areas of the country, schools have already been closing, and some colleges have canceled in-person classes for the rest of the semester.

So, how should parents discuss this rapidly changing public health crisis with their children without freaking them out?

First and foremost, don’t talk to them when you’re feeling panicked yourself. I learned this the hard way when my daughter told me I had been talking about the coronavirus outbreak a lot, and that it was stressing her out.

One way to process an underlying sense of anxiety is to identify the legitimate worries exacerbating it. For parents of children who have chronic health conditions or who are immunocompromised, there is the primary fear of wanting to keep them healthy and safe -- even though the infection rate for children has been low -- and having to rely on others to follow rules designed to protect the most vulnerable. Others live with or near elderly relatives, who are very susceptible to the virus.

Even for those with healthy families, the specter of extended school closures provokes anxiety. A significant number of working parents don’t have paid sick leave -- or any leave at all. Some depend on school lunches to help feed their children. And plenty of people cannot work from home, and have no child care options during the day.

All of these concerns can feel like underlying threats to basic survival -- even if the individual health risks remain low.

Then there are practical concerns: What would a quarantine with children at home look like? How long would it last? Would we still be able to get the food, medicine and supplies we need?

And it’s not just school schedules potentially being disrupted. Parents must ask themselves: What should we do about travel plans already paid for? What about special events with large groups of people, like weddings? How might this impact AP tests, graduations, extracurriculars?

Many parents are planners, and panic is fueled by uncertainty. Considering the extent of the unknowables in this scenario, it’s understandable to feel some anxiety -- especially for those already prone to worry. That’s partly why there’s been such a run on toilet paper and hand sanitizer. We’ve hyper-focused on a few things we can do: buying disinfectant and washing our hands so much that no moisturizer can keep up.

After acknowledging the legitimacy of these concerns, however, the next step is to remind ourselves to keep a sense of perspective -- and to instill the same in our kids. Schedule disruptions and event cancelations are minor, compared to serious illness or death. I’ve told my kids that sacrificing some personal desires can possibly help save other people’s lives. We can work for the common good, while acknowledging the feelings of disappointment that may arise.

Children pick up on our emotional cues, so if we respond to the prospect of a school closure as simply an inconvenience, and not a crisis, it helps calm kids’ fears.

The nonprofit Child Mind Institute suggests talking to children in an age-appropriate way about coronavirus, reassuring them about the steps being taken to keep them safe, and sticking to routines when possible.

Of course, it’s important to remind children about washing their hands frequently and keeping a distance from anyone who is coughing or seems sick. For my part, I’m having my kids take extra vitamin C to help boost immunity, buying more disinfecting wipes to clean smartphones at night, and taking more walks outside to help reduce stress.

It should also go without saying that if the health department advises you to self-quarantine, for God’s sake, follow their instructions.

Parents intuitively know that their children’s friendships are important. They want them to learn how to be a good friend and to maintain solid friendships because we know these skills are critical to lifelong happiness.

But those relationships might be even more crucial than we thought.

A new book by Lydia Denworth, “Friendship: The Evolution, Biology and Extraordinary Power of Life’s Fundamental Bond,” explains the connection between social relationships and personal health. Interactions with friends help lower stress, keep our brains healthy, improve cardiovascular functioning and immune systems, and help us live longer.

Denworth explains the emerging science on how and why friendship literally changes our brains and bodies.

“Over the last few decades, evidence has piled up to show that our relationships, including friendships, affect our health at a much deeper level -- tweaking not just our psychology and motivation, but the function and structure of our organs and cells,” she writes.

It turns out that friendships are just as essential to staying healthy as diet, exercise and sleep. While this takeaway may not come as a big surprise to many, social relationships don’t figure into parenting and education decisions at the level they deserve.

Denworth said researching the book affected the way she parents her own children. She reprioritized the time her adolescent children wanted to spend with friends, better understood the depths of their emotions around friendships, relaxed about the hours her son spent playing video games with a buddy during their summer break, and rethought her reluctance on sleepovers. She also relaxed about social media use: Research finds it’s not necessarily as detrimental as originally thought, and can be used in productive ways.

“There’s a balancing act (for parents) of not over-inserting (friends) in kids’ social lives, but understanding that their social lives are hugely important for their lifelong health and happiness, and that these are skills that must be polished,” she said.

When children are younger, parents can take a more active role in arranging play dates, checking in with teachers if their child seems to be struggling socially, and encouraging positive social interactions. Similarly, schools can be more proactive when children are young. They can incorporate tools like a recess “buddy bench,” where children can find playmates when they need one.

They can also help guide young children to better understand social cues when asking to join in a game.

It’s not about being the most popular kid, Denworth said. She cites research that found that, for a child being bullied, having even a single friend provides an emotional buffer and support.

But facilitating friendship becomes trickier when children are older and averse to social engineering by adults.

When children move to middle school, it’s normal for them to experience significant turnover in their circle of friends, she said. Parents can empower their children with this knowledge as they go through this transition, and reassure them it’s normal to discover new friendships. She cites a study of middle schoolers in which two-thirds of sixth-graders changed friendships between the fall and spring of their first year of middle school.

Schools ought to provide robust support for affinity groups and clubs. These encourage social ties and give students the opportunity to make new friends and create a sense of belonging, at a time when children are struggling to create their own identities. Children do better in school when they collaborate with friends.

The public perception is that loneliness increases as people age, but Denworth found research that indicates that young people experience the most loneliness. Given the amount of attention schools and parents pay to preventing bullying, it makes sense to pay just as much attention to fostering friendships.

Friendship is much more than an emotional bonus; it’s a biological imperative.

We ought to treat it as such.

SLAM!

One of the boys had done it again: run upstairs and slammed the bedroom door behind him.

Parents Kenny and Sam Evers decided this was enough. They were tired of reminding their sons Zach, 11, and Tyler, 9, to stop making so much noise with that door.

So Kenny calmly walked upstairs and took the door off the hinges. He and Sam had threatened to do it before, but their words clearly hadn’t sunk in. Their older son, Gavin, 13, never had a problem closing his bedroom door quietly, but the slamming had become a habit with the younger boys, and it often woke the toddler, Bella.

Initially, Zach shrugged off the missing door.

“Oh, I don’t care,” he said to his father.

A couple of days later, he told his dad that it was kind of annoying not to have a door.

“I bet,” Kenny said. “Do you want it back?”

“Nope,” his son replied.

A couple of more days passed, and Zach came back with another request: “Can I put up a sheet where my door was?”

“Well, you can’t slam a sheet, so go ahead,” said Kenny.

Within a few more days, the boys had had enough: “Can we please have the door back? We will never slam it again.”

The door went back up a couple of months ago, and the lesson seems to have stuck, their parents say. It’s a punishment that’s been around for generations, and many parents swear by its effectiveness.

I reached out to Katherine Reynolds Lewis, parent educator and author of “The Good News About Bad Behavior: Why Kids Are Less Disciplined Than Ever -- And What to Do About It,” to get her take on this approach. Reynolds asked me to consider the purpose of discipline. The goal is not just to make kids behave, she said, but to make them active participants in how to get along and live considerately with others.

She cited the “four R’s” that can transform punishment into learning: The consequence should be 1. Related to the action, 2. Revealed in advance, 3. Reasonable in scope and 4. Respectfully delivered.

In this particular case, she suggested the parents could have implemented this approach by asking the children to brainstorm ways to help them remember to stop slamming the door and what possible consequences would be.

“Does anyone have an idea on how to have less door-slamming?” she suggested. “When (children) have a voice and buy in, they see themselves as actors with responsibility ... and that is the goal we want,” Reynolds said.

Some kids will simply respond they will “try harder” to make whatever changes the parent wants. That’s not a good enough answer, Reynolds said. The parent should help the child break down what “trying harder” looks like in action -- small, concrete steps. She advocates “a total change in mindset” about punishment that moves from fixing one problematic behavior to building lifelong social skills through collaboration.

“It’s not that the (punishment) is necessarily bad,” she said. “It’s how you arrive at it.”

This sounds great in theory, and is the type of parenting I aspire to. But sometimes you’re exhausted and just need the door to stop slamming. I get that, too.

It was the Evers’ next move that took the traditional door-off-the-hinges punishment to another level. About an hour after the door was removed, Sam had an idea. They put the door on the coffee table, and she and her husband re-created the lifeboat scene from “Titanic.”

“You can see Zach in the background (of the picture) with a look on his face, ‘That’s our door,’” she said. They also re-created scenes from “Monsters, Inc.,” “Frozen” and “The Parent Trap,” with the door as the pivotal prop.

Even the two who had just lost their door privileges eventually got into the re-enactments, she said. Tyler ran upstairs to bring his father a robe to borrow for the “Monsters, Inc.” scene.

A week later, he closed the door behind him.

Quietly.