For many families in Israel today, the most basic promise made to children—keeping them safe—feels painfully uncertain. Sirens pierce the day and night. Warnings arrive before alarms, giving us precious seconds to prepare, but also prolonging the dread. Even in moments of physical protection, emotional safety remains elusive.
This is the crisis of wartime childhood—not only the threat of danger but the erosion of certainty.
The current conflict with Iran marks a deepening of patterns that began after Oct. 7, 2023. Parents are struggling not only to protect their children but to feel like parents at all. Parenting depends on a sense of efficacy—on the belief that we can soothe, guide and protect. When that foundation is shaken, the entire family system is affected.
Children don’t need perfect safety to grow and thrive. But they do need at least a sense of relative security. When that is compromised, their development is at risk.
How can we respond? First, we must accept a difficult truth: We cannot shield children from fear. What we can do is help them make sense of it.
Following the events of Oct. 7, one of the most important lessons we learned is that silence is not protective. Very young children, even infants, experience the stress around them. They hear the alarms. They feel the tension in their parents’ bodies. Without explanation, they are left to interpret these experiences on their own.
And children, while excellent observers, are not the best interpreters: A child who sees a parent crying may believe that he or she is the cause. A child who feels fear without explanation may imagine something even more frightening than reality. In the absence of language, anxiety can develop.
This is why protecting a child has two parts—taking them to the shelter to protect their body and speaking to them to protect their mind. That conversation must be honest, while developmentally appropriate. We must not burden young children with the full weight of war. But we should give them a framework; we can tell them that something is happening and acknowledge that they may feel worried or afraid. We should add that it’s not their fault and that adults are working to keep them safe.
Equally important is helping parents regulate themselves. A parent overwhelmed by fear cannot provide a sense of stability. In the Duet Center at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU), we work with parents, teachers and therapists to support children growing up under chronic stress. We focus on what we call “reflective functioning”—the ability of parents to understand both their own emotions and their child’s inner world.
In practical terms, this means helping parents pause and ask: What is my child feeling right now? What might be behind this behavior? What am I feeling, and how is that affecting my response? This reflective capacity is not a luxury but a protective factor.
Our work is grounded in communities. Rather than relying solely on centralized services, we train local professionals—teachers, therapists, community leaders—to deliver evidence-based interventions. This capacity-building approach allows support to reach families quickly, even in regions under acute threat, where warning times for missile attacks can be as short as seconds or completely nonexistent.
We are also addressing challenges faced by families of military reservists. When a parent returns from combat, the home can become another site of stress. A child’s crying may trigger a heightened sensory response. A spouse may be exhausted. Children may feel uncertain about whether the parent will stay or leave again. Without intervention, these dynamics can strain relationships at the very moment families need cohesion the most.
Another lesson is more counterintuitive: When the sirens quiet down, the psychological impact often intensifies. During acute danger, children and parents activate survival mechanisms. They cope, adapt and endure. Yet when the external threat subsides, delayed reactions emerge: anxiety, sleep disturbances, aggression and behavioral changes. This is why early intervention is critical. A toddler who develops anxiety symptoms cannot wait a year for treatment. In early childhood, a year is a lifetime.
After Oct. 7, we opened a hotline staffed by more than 100 volunteer mental-health professionals, providing 24/7 support to parents of young children during an extremely stressful period and offering immediate psychological first-aid interventions.
At BGU, part of our mission is to serve the communities of the Negev region and beyond—not only through research but through direct impact. In this spirit, we are working to build the capacity and secure the resources needed to establish the Duet@BGU intervention center in the coming year. This initiative is intended to expand access to timely, evidence-based care, particularly for young children, while thoughtfully integrating research with real-world intervention. In this way, what we learn in the field can inform our science, and what we discover in research strengthens our response on the ground.
Israel has become a global laboratory for understanding trauma across an entire society. This reality carries responsibility.
To that end, we are building long-term studies to follow children growing up in wartime, seeking to understand not only what causes trauma but what helps them thrive. A new large-scale, multisite longitudinal study will track children born before and during the war, generating critical insight into both risk and resilience.
In times like these, healing does not begin after the war. It begins when we hold our children’s minds—so they can learn, one day, to hold their own.
