Children in War

The Syrian civil war is an enormous human tragedy that is near impossible to understand from afar. With our work, we aim to increase understanding of how families and future generations are impacted by traumatic experiences and how families that have fled the conflicts in Syria are able to cope and persevere in Turkish refugee camps.

In our first study, 100 families from Aleppo were interviewed and given a battery of psychological tests that assess emotional processing, working memory, attention, risk-taking and psychological capacities. We are primarily interested in two questions:

1. How adults are impacted by their negative experiences and subsequent post-traumatic stress and their ability to transform this into growth
   
2. How children of different ages are impacted by their own experiences of war and by living in families where parents experience poor mental health.