Not All Work Is Equal: Livelihoods, Depression, and Child Outcomes in Displacement

In protracted displacement settings, fathers who cannot access meaningful work lose more than income. Many fathers lose the psychological structure that buffers their children from distress. In this paper, we examine whether that mechanism is measurable, and whether it depends on the quality of work, not just its presence. Drawing on a cross-sectional survey of 392 Rohingya refugee fathers with children aged two to six years across six camps in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, we estimate hierarchical regression models and bootstrapped causal mediation analyses. Historical trauma burden — the accumulated weight of legal exclusion, violence, and displacement — is the dominant predictor of paternal depression (ΔR² = 0.43, p < .001), and it renders employment and income non-significant when entered alongside them. Paternal depression, in turn, significantly predicts child behavioral distress (B = 0.32, p < .001). The mediation pathway from employment to child distress, operating through paternal depression, is significant only for stable income work (ACME = −0.58, 95% CI [−1.18, −0.09], p = .046) and null for precarious income work (ACME = −0.06, 95% CI [−0.56, 0.39], p = .810). Day labor — the dominant occupational category among employed fathers and the kind of work 93% of fathers said they did not want — provides no protective pathway for children. These findings challenge the assumption that any employment constitutes livelihood recovery and have direct implications for how humanitarian programs are designed.