H. Keilson (1979) coined the term "sequential traumatization" for the accumulation of traumatic stresses confronting the Holocaust survivors before, during, and after the war. A central question is whether survivors were able to raise their children without transmitting the traumas of their past. Through a series of meta-analyses on 32 samples involving 4,418 participants, we tested the hypothesis of secondary traumatization in Holocaust survivor families. In the set of adequately designed nonclinical studies, no evidence for the influence of the parents' traumatic Holocaust experiences on their children was found. Secondary traumatization emerged only in studies on clinical participants, who were stressed for other reasons. A stress-diathesis model is used to interpret the absence of secondary traumatization in nonclinical offspring of Holocaust survivors.

Three studies examined associations between early child care and child outcomes among families different from those in the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) Early Child Care Research Network study. Results suggest that quality is an important influence on children's development and may be an important moderator of the amount of time in care. Thus, the generalizability of the NICHD findings may hinge on the context in which those results were obtained. These studies, conducted in three national contexts, with different regulatory climates, ranges of child care quality, and a diversity of family characteristics, suggest a need for more complete estimates of how both quality and quantity of child care may influence a range of young children's developmental outcomes.

The current set of meta-analyses elucidates the long-term psychiatric, psychosocial, and physical consequences of the Holocaust for survivors. In 71 samples with 12,746 participants Holocaust survivors were compared with their counterparts (with no Holocaust background) on physical health, psychological wellbeing, posttraumatic stress symptoms, psychopathological symptomatology, cognitive functioning, and stressrelated physiology. Holocaust survivors were less well adjusted, as apparent from studies on nonselected samples (trimmed combined effect size d ϭ 0.22, 95% CI [0.13, 0.31], N ϭ 9,803) and from studies on selected samples (d ϭ 0.45, 95% CI [0.32, 0.59], N ϭ 2,943). In particular, they showed substantially more posttraumatic stress symptoms (nonselect studies: d ϭ 0.72, 95% CI [0.46, 0.98], N ϭ 1,763). They did not lag, however, much behind their comparisons in several other domains of functioning (i.e., physical health, stress-related physical measures, and cognitive functioning) and showed remarkable resilience. The coexistence of stress-related symptoms and good adaptation in some other areas of functioning may be explained by the unique characteristics of the symptoms of Holocaust survivors, who combine resilience with the use of defensive mechanisms. In most domains of functioning no differences were found between Israeli samples and samples from other countries. The exception was psychological well-being: For this domain it was found that living in Israel rather than elsewhere can serve as a protective factor. A biopsychological stress-diathesis model is used to interpret the findings, and future directions for research and social policy are discussed.

Holocaust survivors may have been able to protect their daughters from their war experiences, although they themselves still suffer from the effects of the Holocaust.

Infants’ patterns of attachment to their mothers and fathers influence important developmental outcomes. Studies suggest that infants form discordant attachment patterns to mothers and fathers, and stress the importance of assessing infants’ parental attachment relationships to evaluate their integrative effects on how they function later in life. However, such studies are few, based on small samples, and not well‐designed longitudinally. Moreover, mixed results on how infants’ attachment patterns to mothers and fathers affect important developmental outcomes have resulted in theoretical inconsistencies regarding the model that best describes the organization of multiple attachment relationships and their effect on later development. In this article, we review research on the unsettled issue of infants’ network of attachment to mothers and fathers, and propose explanatory models that can be tested empirically; the methods we suggest are more robust and innovative than those that have been used traditionally.