Anger and Sadness Regulation in Refugee Children: The Roles of Pre- and Post-migratory Factors

International Displacement and Family Stress in Latin America

Family stress theories posit that individual family members are positioned to adapt to external stressors differently and that these differences can strain family systems. Analyzing in-depth interviews with a diverse sample of migrant mothers in Costa Rica, we investigate how families adjust to the stressors of international displacement. Three stages of family stress adjustment emerged from our analysis: (1) parents' prioritization of safety, (2) parents' and children's grappling with new legal, economic, and social circumstances, and (3) parents' protracted uncertainty in one or more of these realms concomitant with children's feeling resettled. A fourth stage of (4) convergent parent and child resettling also emerged, but only among select families who enjoyed stable financial or emotional support from extended kin or local institutions in Costa Rica. Parents' perceptions of their security, and social, economic, and legal circumstances contributed to the progression between stages of stress adjustment.

Children's Emotional and Behavioral Response Following a Migration: A Scoping Review

Background

Migration is a present and pressing global phenomenon, as climate change and political instability continue to rise, more populations will be forced to relocate. Efficient strategies must be in place to aid the transition of vulnerable populations - such as children - and strategic interventions designed based on an understanding of their particular needs and risks.

Aim of the review

This article reviewed recent research regarding the mental health of migrant children identifying a wide array of common characteristics to their emotional and behavioral responses following a migration, and compiled an extensive list of protective and risk factors. 48 studies were selected from Proquest, WOS, SCOPUS, and Pubpsych published between 2015 and 2022 covering studies of children around the world.

Findings

The migration-related factors that most negatively impacted children's mental health were experiences such as discrimination, loss of access to governmental and educational resources, premigration trauma, loss of community, cultural distance and acculturation, the burden on the family unit, and socioeconomic difficulties. Thus, with the right interventions and policy changes, it is possible to make migration a non-traumatic experience in order to avoid the common emergence of depressive symptoms, PTSS (post-traumatic stress symptoms), anxiety, and other mental health issues. Supporting the family unit's transition, encouraging peer connections, and directing government aid to expedite resources upon arrival will serve as protective factors for children while they integrate into their new environment.

Unaccompanied Immigrant Children in ORR Foster Care: Community Level Facilitators of Adjustment Identified by Service Providers

PURPOSE

While many studies address immigrant integration, few focus on the adjustment process for unaccompanied immigrant children in foster care in the United States- and even fewer look at community level prevention and intervention strategies for positive youth adjustment. This study uses a human rights framework to examine community level facilitators- both prevention and interventions- that aid the adjustment for unaccompanied immigrant children in foster care as they navigate life in the US.

METHOD

Seventy-nine service providers that work with unaccompanied immigrant children participated in 22 focus groups/interviews. Open coding was used to create a codebook, and then data were qualitatively analyzed using deductive and axial coding.

RESULTS

The major prevention strategies for community adjustment include welcoming communities and inter-agency collaborations. The major intervention strategies for systems level adjustment include community relationships, access to healthcare, and the church as an institution.

DISCUSSION

Implications include advocating for funding and programming to support mentors for every child, advocating for welcoming policies, and engaging unaccompanied immigrant children in research using participatory approaches.

Immigrant child health in Canada: a scoping review

Introduction

Understanding the health of immigrant children from birth to 18 years of age is important given the significance of the early childhood years and complexity of factors that may influence the health status of immigrant populations. Thus, the purpose of this review was to understand the extent and nature of the literature on the health of immigrant children in Canada.

Methods

We conducted a scoping review of the literature. The review was focused on studies of first-generation and second-generation immigrant children aged 0–18 years. We completed standardised data extraction of immigration status, immigration route, age of children, data source, health or clinical focus, country of origin and major findings.

Results

In total, 250 published papers representing data from 237 studies met the inclusion criteria for this study. A total of 178 articles used quantitative methodologies (mostly survey and cross-sectional study designs), 54 used qualitative methodologies and 18 used mixed methodologies. The articles considered in this review included 147 (59%) focusing on physical health, 76 (30%) focusing on mental health and 37 (15%) focusing on the social aspects of health for refugee and first-generation and second-generation immigrant children across the provinces and territories of Canada.

Conclusions

Several literature gaps exist with respect to child immigrant health in Canada. For instance, there are no exclusive studies on immigrant boys and limited studies on children of international students.

Facilitating the prosocial development of Rohingya refugee children

Prosociality is essential for the success of human societies. Children's prosocial development is found to increase in contexts that foster collaboration or emotion perspective taking and is negatively affected by exposure to extreme psychosocial trauma and adversity. Based on these findings, we assessed the effect of collaboration and emotion perspective taking on three types of prosocial behavior-helping, sharing, and comforting-in Rohingya children living in a refugee settlement in India (N = 122; age range = 4-11 years). Half of the children were born in Myanmar (i.e., experienced forced migration from genocide), and half were born in the refugee settlement after their families left Myanmar. We also included a small sample of Rohingya Canadian children (N = 20; age range = 3-12 years) as a within-culture comparison of overall levels of prosocial responding, which were higher in this group relative to children in a refugee settlement. We assigned children in the refugee settlement to one of three conditions-Collaboration, Emotion Perspective Taking (intervention conditions), or Drawing (control condition)-and assessed the three types of prosocial responding following the intervention. Prosocial responding was highest after Collaboration for children born in the refugee settlement and was highest after Emotion Perspective Taking for children born in Myanmar. Overall, these findings point to the potential prosocial benefit in refugee contexts for intervention programs that are responsive to children's lived experience.

Sadness regulation strategies and measurement: A scoping review

BACKGROUNDS

Accurate measurement and suitable strategies facilitate people regulate their sadness in an effective manner. Regulating or mitigating negative emotions, particularly sadness, is crucial mainly because constant negative emotions may lead to psychological disorders, such as depression and anxiety. This paper presents an overview of sadness regulation strategies and related measurement.

METHOD

Upon adhering to five-step scoping review, this study combed through articles that looked into sadness regulation retrieved from eight databases.

RESULTS

As a result of reviewing 40 selected articles, 110 strategies were identified to regulate emotions, particularly sadness. Some of the most commonly reported strategies include expressive suppression, cognitive reappraisal, distraction, seeking social or emotional support, and rumination. The four types of measures emerged from the review are self-reported, informant report (parents or peers), open-ended questions, and emotion regulation instructions. Notably, most studies had tested psychometric properties using Cronbach's alpha alone, while only a handful had assessed validity (construct and factorial validity) and reliability (Cronbach's alpha or test-retest) based on responses captured from questionnaire survey.

CONCLUSION

Several sadness regulation strategies appeared to vary based on gender, age, and use of strategy. Despite the general measurement of emotion regulation, only one measure was developed to measure sadness regulation exclusively for children. Future studies may develop a comprehensive battery of measures to assess sadness regulation using multi-component method.