Children in War: Attachment, Trauma, Support and Recovery

War exposes adults to traumatic experiences and extreme stress, with negative consequences for their physical and mental health. Many of them are parents with caretaking responsibilities. Children and adolescents not only suffer from war through direct stressors but also indirect through the debilitating effects of war experiences on their caregivers’ parenting abilities. Children need safe, stable, and shared care, and families confronted with war violence need evidence-based social, therapeutic, and parenting support to realise such care. In this book we describe the consequences of war for children, parents, and family life making ample use of findings from the protracted Russian war against Ukraine where one of the authors is working. The emphasis on attachment, trauma, support and recovery during and after wartime is the unique perspective of this concise but comprehensive treatise on families weathering war and on how these families can be supported.This book has four distinctive features. First, we ground our hypotheses, statements, and conclusions in meta-analyses or, if not available, in large epidemiological or (quasi)experimental studies. Second, brief intermezzi present case studies of children and families in wartime to illustrate the scientific findings and their implications. Third, this book is the result of a unique collaboration between developmental scientists with a research background in attachment and intergenerational transmission of war experiences, and a child and adolescent psychiatrist conducting research and clinical work with children and parents during the war in Ukraine. Fourth, we use the protracted war of Russia against Ukraine starting in 2014 as an unfortunately not unique example to illustrate the prevalence and risk factors of mental-health problems in parents and children during the distinct phases of armed conflicts in general.