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This systematic review aimed to explore the effects of different degrees of parental disclosure of traumatic material from the past on the psychological well-being of children in refugee families. A majority of studies emphasize the importance of the timing of disclosure and the manner in which it takes place, rather than the effects of open communication or silencing strategies per se. A pattern emerged in which the level of parental disclosure that promotes psychological adjustment in refugee children depends on whether the children themselves have been directly exposed to traumatic experiences, and whether the children are prepubescent or older. The process of trauma disclosure is highly culturally embedded. Future research needs to address the culturally shaped variations in modulated disclosure and further explore how modulated disclosure can be facilitated in family therapy with traumatized refugee families.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of family functioning in the transgenerational transmission of trauma in a sample of 30 refugee families with traumatized parents and children without a history of direct trauma exposure from the Middle East. Design/methodology/approach Based on qualitative analyses of interview material, families were evaluated using theoretically derived dimensions of family functioning and placed in descriptive categories according to family cohesion, family flexibility, family roles, family coping, stressor pile-up, and marital problems. The association between these descriptive categories of family functioning and the child’s mental health as measured by the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) was explored using point-biserial correlations, correlations, and multiple regression analyses. Findings In all, 22 percent of the variance in children’s SDQ scores could be predicted by whether or not the family experienced a pile-up of stressors and whether or not the family was characterized by role reversal between parents and children. Furthermore, a statically significant association was established between a total measure of adaptive family functioning and lower scores on the SDQ. Originality/value These findings suggest that the transgenerational transmission of trauma may be associated with family functioning and have implications for interventions at several levels.

Although forced migration research on refugee family functioning clearly points to the potential breakdown of parental availability and responsiveness in the context of cumulative migration stressors, studies exploring attachment security in refugee children are surprisingly lacking so far. The authors report their findings from a 2-site, small-scale administration of an attachment measure, adapted for use with refugee children aged between 4 and 9 years from a reliable and validated doll-play procedure. We evaluated interrater reliability and conducted a qualitative analysis of refugee children's narrative response to identify migration-specific representational markers of attachment quality. The level of agreement among 3 independent coders ranged between .54 to 1.00 for both study samples, providing initial psychometric evidence of the measure's value in assessing child attachment security in this population. The exploratory analysis of migration-related narrative markers pointed to specific parameters to be used in parent-child observational assessments in future validation of the attachment measure, such as parental withdrawal or trauma-communication within the parent-child dyad.