Find your village: a call for culturally coordinated understanding and action with migrant heritage families in the Global North

Refugees and forced migrants coming to the ‘Global North’ experience high rates of stress and isolation. Migrant communities are concerned about their young peoples’ long-term health, educational and social outcomes; there are reports of their children being referred at higher rates with early developmental difficulties and subsequently learning difficulties and conditions such as autism. We argue that these distressing experiences are interconnected and understandable in context, and we would like to engage with these accounts as indicating a need for more understanding, debate, negotiation, opportunities, connections and resources. Parents from cultures where ‘it takes a village to raise a child’ may find it particularly challenging to bring up children in individualistic western societies when they also experience stress, trauma, isolation and environmental disadvantage. In a linked paper, we describe an Ecocultural model that seeks to explain challenges to parental wellbeing and early child development for Somali refugee families in its local and international context, and the development of a flexible approach to targeted, preventive peer support intervention we have called Find Your Village, which has the potential to meet these challenges. In this debate paper, we advocate for the development of culturally coordinated understanding and action, describing three ‘pillars’ to build a ‘village’ for migrant children and families in the Global North, and suggest resources and approaches that have the potential to stop cycles of disadvantage, provide multiple benefits, and save costs to society through co-production, inequality reduction and integration.