Parenting in times of refuge A qualitative investigation

This qualitative study sheds light on how the different phases of refuge and resettlement shape parents’ perceptions of their parenting. We used in-depth interviews to examine parents’ accounts of how refuge gave rise to different stressors, and how these in turn shaped parenting. We interviewed 27 Syrian refugee parents recently settled in the Netherlands (16 families) twice, using a grounded theory approach. We distinguished five phases of refuge, namely prewar, war, flight, displacement, and resettlement. During flight and displacement, some stressors (e.g., financial and material losses) induced parental feelings of empathy for children’s suffering increasing parental leniency. Other stressors, also during displacement (e.g., family separations), placed more burdens on parents and increased the uncertainty families experienced, increasing parental emotional exhaustion and compromising parental warmth and sensitive discipline. While narratives showed that most families reacted fairly similarly to most stressors that came in the phases of war, flight, and displacement, families reacted much more differently to stressors in resettlement (e.g., acculturation stress). In resettlement, some parents experienced post-traumatic growth (e.g., increased compassion for their children) and were more autonomy supporting than before the war. Other parents considered their children’s perspective less and were more controlling. Our findings suggest that emotional exhaustion plays a key role in how parents viewed their parenting changed during refuge, and that individual differences in parents’ abilities to recover from emotional exhaustion played a key role in shaping parenting in resettlement.