----- Sigmund Freud

She sat before me like someone carrying the weight of several lifetimes in a single body: a woman in her forties, whose face held both the softness of a mother and the silent ruins of a war. Around her, the entire camp was living through a threefold psychological suffering that went far beyond the lifelong practical and financial devastation they would endure. There was the grief of their murdered family members; the trauma of the women and girls who had been raped or sold; and the trauma each survivor carried within their body. Her thirteen-year-old daughter had been kidnapped by a militia months earlier. The family had lived in the suspended terror of not knowing whether she was alive or had already been buried. All the men in the family had been murdered. The women had been raped. When the militia was finally pushed out of their region, the missing girl was found in one of the hideouts—bruised, tortured, mute, staring at familiar faces as if they were strangers from another world. Medical examination confirmed what her silence had suggested; she had been raped. Her mind had retreated into a protective muteness that trauma often forces upon the very young.

Her mother, who had been repeatedly raped in captivity, never spoke of her own suffering. She cried only for her daughters. She grieved her murdered sons and husband in stunned silence. Her voice broke when she whispered that she had failed to protect her girls. When I recommended treatment, she resisted with the same self-sacrificing mindset common among parents in conflict zones. She insisted that she needed nothing but help for her mute daughter. After prolonged, gentle persuasion, she accepted therapeutic help.

In such environments, parenting becomes traumatic.

Parenting generally rests on three major commitments: to keep a child safe; to meet their basic needs; and to prepare them for a future brighter than the present. These demands are hardly achievable in peaceful societies, let alone in Gaza, Sudan, Yemen, Syria and Afghanistan, where they require superhuman courage. There, parents are mere survivors, struggling with their own unaddressed trauma while trying to shield their children from the forces that harmed them.

Trauma is not a single event rather an atmosphere—a constant physiological state in such environments. It shapes entire communities; the parent-child relationship becomes the frontline of psychological survival.

To understand parenting in conflict zones, one must see the double burden these caregivers carry. They must calm their children’s fears while managing flashbacks of their own traumas. They must answer questions with no comforting answers and create a sense of safety where safety is rarely possible. A child looks to a parent for steadiness but the parent may be shaking inside. A child seeks reassurance but the parent may be reliving gunfire, losses and apprehensions. This produces a fragile emotional ecosystem in which both are traumatised and neither has room to recover. Psychologists call this a shared traumatic reality: the caregiver and the child are exposed to the same ongoing threat.

Parents have to make a Herculean effort to set the emotional scaffolding that keeps a child’s psyche intact.

Across Sudan, Yemen, Syria and Afghanistan, parents raise children within overlapping layers of war, displacement and chronic fear. In Sudan, the collapse of community leaves parents to face trauma alone. In Yemen, famine turns caregiving into a daily survival task. In Syria, prolonged conflict produces emotional numbness and dissociation. In Afghanistan, political restrictions and economic collapse fuel constant anticipatory anxiety.

The parents giving birth in rubble today—protecting children from bombs, airstrikes, hunger and displacement—lived the same childhood themselves.

Across all these regions, no resolution is in sight. Children have no future from which to borrow hope. Each day becomes a renewed effort to shield them from bombs, hunger and the slow erosion of childhood.

Across all these regions, trauma affects parenting in similar ways: hypervigilance; emotional withdrawal; irritability; survivor’s guilt; role reversal and complex personality disorders. These patterns are not signs of failure but of survival. They reflect the impossible tension between the instinct to protect and the reality of living where protection is nearly impossible. They show how trauma reorganises the nervous system and reshapes the parent-child bond in ways that are both heartbreaking and ample proof of survival instinct.

The world often focuses on the suffering of children in war—rightly so. But behind every traumatised child stands a traumatised parent holding the family together with hands that shake yet refuse to let go. These parents are not only victims of conflict but are its quiet heroes. They teach hope where hope is dangerous. They create small moments of joy in landscapes of destruction. They carry the emotional weight of their children’s futures while their own hearts break. In places like these, parenting is not just a responsibility. It is an act of defiance—a refusal to let war shape the next generation.

I have long argued that trauma in these regions is the most misunderstood form of psychological suffering. In standard psychology, trauma is a life-threatening event followed by a post-trauma period. But these regions do not experience trauma as a single episode. It is continuous, unrelenting and has persisted for decades. The parents giving birth in rubble today—protecting their children from bombs, airstrikes, hunger and displacement—lived the same childhood themselves. Textbooks call this complex PTSD, yet the definition feels almost trivial when applied here; the reality is far graver.

We also know about trans-generational trauma: parents carry unaddressed trauma from their own childhoods while witnessing new horrors, including the deaths of thousands of children in Gaza alone. Mental-health literature rarely addresses suffering of this scale, perhaps because naming it scientifically would force the world to confront the responsibility of those who perpetuate it.

There is one more truth I have learned from years of supporting parents in active war zones, a truth so stark that even seasoned clinicians hesitate to speak it aloud. Whether these parents succeed or fail in supporting their children is becoming almost irrelevant because the new generation emerging from these conflicts is not merely distressed, they are psychologically transformed. They are growing up abnormally angry, numb, fearless and revengeful, moving through the world with a volatility that terrifies their own families. They can destroy anything without pausing to consider consequences. They are frighteningly indifferent to their own lives—to danger, to death and to what the world thinks of them. This is not a moral failing. It is the predictable outcome of prolonged, unrelenting trauma, the kind yet to be described in existing terminology, because it is far graver than anything textbooks dare to mention.

These children have lived so long with bombs, hunger, displacement and grief that their nervous systems have adapted to a world without safety. Terror has reshaped their emotional development. Their sense of the future has collapsed and their threshold for fear is nearly gone. They are not simply traumatised; they are being formed into people for whom death is more familiar than life.

Unheard and unprotected, these children may grow into adults with nothing left to lose. The future of global peace will be decided by whether we address the long-ignored, volcanic suffering of these children before it erupts into a force that swallows everything in its path.

The writer works as principal clinical psychologist in the Republic of Ireland. He can be reached at [email protected].