Breaking the cycle of intergenerational trauma in crisis zones
The focus must expand beyond children — to parents and other caregivers.
In 2005, in the wake of the Great Indian Ocean Tsunami, Early Childhood Matters published a special issue on the wellbeing of children in crisis zones. Two decades later, nearly half a billion children across the world today live in areas affected by conflict, doubling from the 1990s. Between 2010 and 2024, the number of children displaced by violent conflict had nearly tripled, from 17 million to 48 million. And a billion children are at ‘extremely high risk’ from climate change.
Margaret McCallin, guest editor of the 2005 issue, had decades of experience working with children caught up in conflict zones. In a powerful editorial, she pressed for a critical shift in programmes designed for such settings — from a ‘needs-based’ approach to a ‘rights-based’ one.
A needs-based approach treats people as objects of charity, McCallin wrote. In contrast, a rights-based model recognises people as holders of rights who are encouraged and empowered to claim their rights.
Protecting these rights in crisis settings, often marked by economic collapse, social and political instability and the breakdown of social structures, is a delicate task. For any intervention to work, the focus must expand beyond children — to parents and other caregivers. When done right, it can heal historical harm and help families break the cycle of intergenerational trauma.
Rebuilding lives after a mass trauma event
Take Sia, 36, the mother of three. She wants to create a nurturing home for her children but struggles to contain her sudden outbursts of anger. These moments creep up on her “when my heart is broken,” she says.
Sia is carrying an invisible wound — the trauma of surviving a bloody 11-year civil war that ravaged her country, Sierra Leone. Her anger, she realises, is linked to the survival instincts she developed during the war, when even a hint of ‘weakness’ would put a target on one’s back.
A whole generation of parents like Sia have been given a voice by the Intergenerational Study of War-Affected Youth (ISWAY), led by Dr Theresa Betancourt of the Boston College School of Social Work. Since the war ended, ISWAY has followed 529 young people and their families and identified risk and protective factors that affect their health and wellbeing. In a country that lacks robust formal support from the government and NGOs, ISWAY has shown how people derive resilience from families, friends, and faith communities.
Learnings from the study have been used to develop evidence-based mental health care for at-risk youth; improve school engagement; increase employment opportunities; promote nutrition, health and hygiene; and reduce family violence in hard-to-reach families with young children. Given Sierra Leone’s workforce constraints, the ISWAY team has innovated via digital tools, community health workers, and early childhood teachers to scale these interventions.
In an article in Early Childhood Matters’ 2025 issue, Dr Betancourt and her colleagues tell the story of Sia, Maliki, Araphan, Aminita* and other young parents who are learning to rebuild their lives and create a better future for their children. If you are looking for hope in these restless times, this is the story I urge you to read
*Names have been changed.
Helping parents in crisis zones be the best they can be
How can parents imagine a better future while coping with the daily stressors of life in a conflict zone? That’s the question War Child, an organisation working to improve the lives of children and caregivers in war and conflict zones, is answering through Be There, a programme dedicated to the psychosocial wellbeing of caregivers in such environments.
Be There gives parents and other caregivers a safe space to learn simple, evidence-based stress management tools and techniques under the supervision of trained facilitators. Over nine sessions, they are taken through practical exercises that, for instance, help them better manage their anger or frustration and prevent it from negatively impacting their own wellbeing as well as their relationship with their children.
The team pays rigorous attention to adapting the programme to different local contexts. It organises workshops to ground its staff in locally relevant interpretations of ideas such as ‘stress’ or ‘anxiety’.
Stories from parents demonstrate the programme’s success. Says the War Child team in a 2023 interview: “Many men who participate in our sessions say that they used to be angry at home all the time. Now they tell us that whenever they feel they’re about to be angry, they can use a counting technique or a breathing technique to calm themselves. We know of caregivers who have turned the exercises from the programme into evening or weekend family activities. They sit together and practise relaxation techniques as a family, which is such a beautiful way to reduce interpersonal tension and create bonding.”
Discovering future generations are already here
Researchers in disparate parts of the world have also studied how intergenerational suffering affects lives decades after a crisis. For early development and health expert Tessa Roseboom, that crisis was a devastating food shortage in the Netherlands during the Second World War, known as the Dutch Hunger Winter.
“The egg that made me was formed when my mother was in my grandmother’s womb at the beginning of the Dutch Hunger Winter,” Roseboom says.
Her work has uncovered how, 80 years later, “we can still see the effects of famine on the children born that winter, but also on those children’s children — on my generation — in terms of their physical and mental health, their ability to learn and build meaningful relationships, their sensitivity to stress and risk of addiction, even on their levels of employment.”
She says these stories resonate strongly with people because they feel deeply personal and help galvanise action to prevent future catastrophes. “My ancestors tried to create opportunities for their offspring and their descendants, and I’ve been able to study this, so I feel a responsibility to share; to help people understand that the disaster taking place today” — such as the wars in Gaza, Sudan, and Ukraine — “will have an impact for decades.”
Roseboom adds, however, that we have the agency to change the course of history. “We can prevent the damage from growing even bigger,” she says, “by acting as soon as we can to stop the war[s] and providing food and local care.”
Safeguarding the future from the climate crisis
For the Maasai communities in northern Kenya, acting fast is crucial to protecting an entire way of life at the heart of their family structure. New Maasai mothers traditionally took several months off from household chores and tending livestock to care for the newborn and focus on their own recovery. But as drought and scarcity of resources become pervasive, women have to increasingly undertake heavy household tasks until the last trimester of their pregnancy. Food insecurity puts them at high risk of nutritional deficiencies. The lack of clean water and increased prevalence of water-borne diseases are leading to diarrhoea and other health conditions in infants.
Indigenous women around the world are leading the resistance against climate change and environmental degradation, says Global Greengrants Fund, an organisation that invests in community-driven solutions to environmental harm and social injustice.
“[This is] in part because socially defined gender roles often position them as stewards of the physical, economic, and cultural wellbeing of their communities,” Naomi Lanoi Leleto and Eva Rehse from Global Greengrants Fund write in our 2021 issue. “And since they are seen as being responsible for fetching water and managing land-based natural resources, they are disproportionately impacted by degradation of the environment that damages those resources.”
The fund has supported the women of Naatum Women’s Group to build resilient households that can help to adapt to climate change, through improved management of natural resources and by finding alternative ways for women to support themselves. The group has started collective income-generating activities including beekeeping, savings and lending associations, kitchen gardens for nutrition, and bead making.
“Aligning the climate and childhood agendas, understanding their interconnections and strengthening the case for each has to be a priority,” say Leleto and Rehse. “When we can better understand the links between different phases of life and climate change, we can respond more holistically to the challenges faced by Indigenous women, their children and their communities.
The Good Start Challenge for Parental Wellbeing
Van Leer Foundation launched the Good Start Challenge to reimagine support for parents and caregivers in the early years, with a specific focus on underserved communities exposed to harsh climates, conflict and displacement. Twenty-two innovation teams have been selected as finalists, spanning Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Ethiopia, Kenya, Senegal, Uganda, Indonesia and the Philippines. Their innovations range from play-based trauma recovery for flood-affected families to free legal support for mothers experiencing displacement, and community empowerment for disenfranchised fathers to bond with their babies from pregnancy.
Why did we initiate the Challenge and who are the Finalists? Discover in the highlights video below
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