The uninvited guest of war enters childhood: Developmental and personality aspects of war and military violence.

Abstract

Children show great differences in their ways of appraising threat, seeking help, and expressing emotions when facing traumatic events. This chapter focuses on developmental and personality aspects of trauma responses. It is hypothesized that each developmental age provides children unique protecting resources, on one hand, and makes them vulnerable, on the other. These protecting and risk dynamics are analysed among infants, toddlers, school-age children and adolescents. Concerning the link between personality and trauma, attachment theory and temperament research are viewed. The argument is that insecure-avoidant children are vulnerable due to their tendency to deny dangers, distrust others’ help and cope by distraction and withdrawal. Insecure-ambivalent children are at risk due to their exaggeration of danger and overactivation of negative emotions. Secure children in their part, accurately perceive the trauma, trust in their own resources and others’ ability to help, and show balanced emotional, cognitive and behavioural responses. The implications for helping children cope with war and military violence are discussed.

Randomized Control Trial of a CBT Trauma Recovery Program in Palestinian Schools

“…Positively, intervention students perceived educational gains, suggesting the program had an impact on improving student perception of learning capacity. More broadly, Punamaki (2002) suggests school-based protective factors may contribute to the development of student resilience across a range of developmental domains. Future research needs to explore the extent to which programs such as TRT enable the development of school protective factors and aid the generalization of developmental gains both during and following conflict.…”

The psychosocial aspects of children exposed to war: practice and policy initiatives

“…In general, young children are assumed to be more vulnerable than adolescents due to their less developed cognitive capacities for remembering, processing, and coping with trauma (Fivush, 1998; Schneider, 2000). On the other hand, there is also a strong belief that the youngest children experience some protection from the severity of trauma because they do not understand the full measure of its negative consequences (Punamaki, 2002). Many studies tend to agree about the greater vulnerability of children between 5 and 9 years (e.g., Garbarino & Kostelny, 1996; Kuterovac‐Jagodic, 2003), whose ability to be aware of and to process real events is expanding, but who still lack consolidated identities and higher order defense mechanisms.…”

Development of a multi-layered psychosocial care system for children in areas of political violence

“…A broad spectrum of consequences have been reported, including disruption of normal developmental pathways [3], breakdown of social structures such as family and school systems [4,5], increased psychopathology such as depression, post traumatic stress disorder and anxiety [6,7], as well as literature stressing the non-pathological nature of children's reactions, such as increased aggression, withdrawal, pre-occupation with negative thoughts [8]. At the same time, there are authors that warn for pathologizing entire populations and advocating children's and community's resilience [9,10].…”