Creating “a Safe Haven”: Emotion-Regulation Strategies Employed by Mothers and Young Children Exposed to Recurrent Political Violence

Growing evidence underscores the need to counteract the mental health risks for children growing up in traumatic situations of political violence. This study examined the concurrent emotional regulation (ER) strategies employed by mothers and their children in meeting this challenge. Following several incidents of rocket attacks, in southern Israel, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 30 mothers and their children (ages 5–7). Additionally, mothers completed the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (Gross and John 2003). The main theme emerging from the qualitative analyses of the interviews with the children was adherence to the perception of the shelter room in the home as a “safe haven”, supported by constructed knowledge and acquired skills related to physical safety, as well as the sense of emotional availability of their caregivers. The children used imagination, play and physiological regulation modeled by the mothers. The interviews with the mothers revealed their effort to convey a sense of calm and routine, even when these were interrupted. They used self-talk concerning the children’s needs and tried to regulate their own physiological and psychological arousal. Mothers who expressed in the interviews satisfaction with the management of their ER reported significantly higher use of cognitive reappraisal strategies than those expressing dissatisfaction. Mothers help children construct meanings related to stressful events and teach and model evidence-based tactics for ER. Interventions for coping with a toxic reality should involve both psycho-education about children’s needs and address mothers’ own ER strategies, especially the use of cognitive reappraisal.