‘I have to think about my children; my life is over’: understanding parent–child relational resilience dynamics among Eritrean asylum-seeking families

This qualitative study focuses on the reciprocal nature of resilience-building in forced migration, examining parents’ and children’s daily interactions based on relational resilience frameworks. This study explores the lived experiences of Eritrean asylum-seeking families in Israel, who face systemic exclusion, socioeconomic hardship, and legal precarity. Results of the thematic analysis of in-depth interviews with 13 parents and 10 children highlight how resilience emerges through adaptive role reconfigurations: Children contribute to household functioning, and parents act as protective mediators. The parent–child relationship functions as a relational resilience mechanism across parent and child accounts: Children provide emotional and instrumental support to parents, reinforcing their motivation, whereas parents foster resilience in children through dyadic emotion regulation, offering emotional security. Drawing on family resilience and parentification literature, we demonstrate how dynamics that might be interpreted as problematic parentification in Western frameworks function as culturally embedded resilience mechanisms within the structural constraints and cultural norms of Eritrean refugee families.