Risk and Resilience of Refugee Children Surviving War and Displacement

Abstract

Armed conflict and its aftermath cause undeniable harm to the mental health and education of children, posing multiple ongoing threats to their survival and rights. The average length of displacement for a refugee today is over 25 years, meaning that millions of children will carry a “dual burden” of war traumas as well as daily displacement stressors through childhood and beyond. Yet the exact mechanisms through which refugee children’s experiences of different conflict-related adversities influence their mental health and education outcomes remain unclear.

This three-paper dissertation draws from methods of psychology, neuroscience, and education and uses a risk and resilience theoretical framework to illuminate these mechanisms. Using both quantitative and qualitative methods and primary and secondary data, I examine layers of refugee children’s socioecological contexts during sensitive periods of early childhood and adolescence (a) to describe how distinct dimensions of war trauma and displacement stress shape their developmental outcomes and (b) to discern how factors such as caregivers, peers, schools, legal status, and others contribute to their risk and/or resilience.

Paper 1 studies Syrian adolescent refugees (n=240) displaced to and living in Jordan in 2015. Using an innovative neuropsychology tablet assessment to gauge executive functioning, this quantitative research found that adolescents’ greater feelings of insecurity significantly predicted

poor inhibitory control, that PTSD significantly predicted poorer working memory, but cumulative trauma exposures did not predict poorer cognition. Paper 2 studies Syrian, Afghan, Palestinian, and Iraqi primary caregivers (n=50) of refugee infants and toddlers displaced to Lebanon and Greece in 2016-2018. Through interviews, this qualitative study formed a typology of war and displacement adversities and identified four pathways through which caregivers reported connections between such adversities and their compromised mental health and negative parenting behaviors. Paper 3 examines 19 existing studies featuring multinational adolescent unaccompanied refugee minors (URMs) displaced to the United States, Canada, and Europe from 1990-2019. Through integrative metasynthesis, this qualitative study found that the literature describes URMs’ educational resilience primarily as derived from their individual strengths, whereas risk factors were largely identified in their microsystem, exosystem, and macrosystem. The literature shows systemic barriers such as denied legal asylum status, withdrawn mental health services, and discriminatory school bureaucracies to have cascading negative consequences for URMs’ educational pursuit, persistence, and success.

Together, my results indicate that risk and resilience are not mutually exclusive for refugee children, that displacement stressors matter in addition to war traumas in shaping developmental outcomes, and that ultimately, prolonged resilience in a context of protracted displacement may hold future risks for children. Findings suggest the need to address risk factors at multiple levels of children’s socioecological environments to improve outcomes for refugee child mental health and education.