"We Laugh with the Children so We Forget and Overcome Our Problems": Parental Suffering and Resilience Among Recently Displaced Syrian Families in Lebanon

Background and Purpose: Over one million of the 5.5 million recently displaced Syrian refugees now live in Lebanon. In addition to extreme loss, fear, and grief, they face violence, overcrowding, and insecurity surrounding healthcare, food, employment, and housing. Refugee children are extraordinarily vulnerable. Yet, we know that parents are an essential source of constancy and support, and effectively promote children's resilience even in the worst of circumstances. To build on this potential, however, more information is needed about the realities of refugee parents in these contexts.

Methods: Our research explores parental resilience using data from collaborative family interviews with 184 individuals within 46 families who fled Syria and resettled in Lebanon in the last five years. Collaborative family interviews consisted of discussions about parenting within the context of political violence, migration, and resettlement. Children participated in the research through drawing, mapmaking, and engagement in the collaborative family interview. Data were analyzed through careful reading and collation of transcripts to ascertain meaning and significance that participants attributed to their experiences. Transcripts were coded and concepts were generated then categorized into themes related to parenting.

Results: The results focused on the challenges parents faced and the ways they attempted to endure within the refugee experience, organized along three temporal dimensions: the past (pre-flight); the present (flight, initial resettlement in the camps); and the future (hopes, aspirations, and preparations for stable resettlement). From the start of the war, parents' foremost priority was protecting their children, and they desperately searched for safety, stability, and resources. Parents spoke about the distress caused by family separation, and the loss of the norms, social support, and sense of parental efficacy they had in Syria. Parents also described their own mental health issues related to war and displacement, which influenced their parenting. At the same time as they highlighted suffering, parents' narratives also highlighted how they continued, and even amplified, their caretaking. Parents comforted and distracted children to help them endure the terrible realties of war and displacement. In refugee camps, parents restricted their children's mobility to try to keep them safe, provided moral guidance, increased family closeness and communication, and planned for children's futures, particularly through education.

Conclusions and Implications: The results underscore that programs to support child protection must broaden the focus to include the whole family unit, specifically the emotional health of caregivers and the ways it is undermined by parenting within such adversity. This set of findings has important implications for practice with refugee communities. Typically, aid agencies tend to focus primarily on basic needs, such as those for food and shelter. Yet, given the importance of the parent role, and the ways that parents from refugee communities might benefit from additional support in fulfilling their role, special attention ought to be paid to the factors that bolster parental success, such as mental health, a sense of parental efficacy, social support, and sustainable economic development.