In my last post entitled, ‘When the Sirens Haven’t Stopped’, I explored what happens to the brain when danger is not a memory but a recurring reality — when the sirens have not entirely stopped. I described how trauma changes the brain’s sense of risk, causing what is merely possible to feel permanently probable, and offered a set of principles for managing the nervous system when safety cannot be assumed.

What follows is not a revision of those principles but an additional layer — one intended specifically for parents. Raising children inside a conflict zone is not simply a more intense version of what every civilian endures. It is a different experience altogether. And that difference points toward a coping resource that research has identified but that almost no public writing on wartime psychology has yet named.

A note on focus before proceeding. The psychological needs of children living in conflict zones are profound, extensively documented, and far better addressed by those who specialize in child psychology than by this author. What follows does not attempt that ground. It addresses something that has received considerably less attention: the inner emotional experience of the parent themselves — distinct from, though inseparable from, the children they are protecting. Adults without children face their own emotionally distinct challenges in war zones, ones that are also under explored and deserve serious attention. This piece focuses specifically on parents, because what the research reveals about their experience contains insights that have not yet made it out of the academic literature and into the conversations where they are needed most.

What Parents Carry That Others Do Not

Most adults under ongoing threat are afraid for one person: themselves. A parent is afraid for themselves and, more acutely, for a child they are wired to protect. Research from conflict-affected populations in Israel, Gaza, Lebanon, and Ukraine consistently shows that rates of PTSD among parents run substantially higher than among the general civilian population — and that the intensity of a parent’s symptoms is more closely tied to how threatened their child feels than to how threatened they themselves feel. The fear faces outward. It does not simply add to the burden — it multiplies it.

With that comes a specific and largely unspoken form of exhaustion: the effort of hiding their own fear so the child does not absorb it. A parent who reaches the shelter shaking and then steadies their voice to say “we are safe now” is doing this at exactly the moment when, as I described in my previous piece, the brain’s alarm system has already fired and its reasoning capacity is still catching up. The body is in full alert. The calm performance must happen anyway. Each such experience takes a toll — emotional numbness, physical symptoms, a bone-deep tiredness that is hard to explain even to oneself. It is made heavier by guilt: the feeling of falling short of the parent they know themselves to be, measured against a standard that was built in peacetime and was never designed for this.

What the Research Found — and Almost No One Has Said

Here is the insight I want to offer — one the clinical literature has documented but that has not yet reached the people who most need to hear it.

Most of what is written about parents in conflict zones focuses on one direction: the parent’s emotional state shapes the child’s. This is true. But research on how closely bonded people regulate each other’s nervous systems shows that the same process runs in both directions. When a parent is overwhelmed, the child feels it and becomes harder to settle — which in turn makes the parent more overwhelmed. But the reverse is equally real and equally measurable: when a child is calm, absorbed in play, laughing, or physically close, that state passes back into the parent. The child’s nervous system steadies the parent’s.

This is not a metaphor. It is a documented biological process. Parent and child are not two separate people each managing their own distress. They are in continuous, mutual, moment-to-moment physical conversation — and that conversation can work in the parent’s favor.

Parents who allow themselves to be drawn into their child’s world — who let themselves follow a child into a game, share a laugh, sit quietly together — are not escaping their responsibilities. They are drawing on a calming resource that is already there, costs nothing, and belongs uniquely to them as parents. Almost every conversation about wartime parenting tells parents how to calm their children. Almost none of them mention that the child is also, quietly and continuously, calming the parent.

An Invitation, Not an Indulgence

Many parents living under threat will read this and feel an immediate resistance. Sitting on the floor to play while the situation outside remains dangerous feels wrong — like a lapse in attention, a luxury they have not earned, a betrayal of the seriousness of what their family is facing. That feeling is understandable. It is also, the research suggests, mistaken.

A nervous system held in continuous high alert eventually becomes less effective, not more. As I described in my previous piece, the brain needs periods of lower activation in order to remain capable of responding well when real threat arrives. A parent who never steps out of survival mode does not become a better protector. They become a more depleted one.

Moments of genuine connection with your child — play, storytelling, a shared meal that is treated as a meal rather than just fuel, a bedtime routine held to even when everything else has collapsed — are not a retreat from your protective role. They are how you sustain it. They restore the biological capacity that protection requires. They steady both nervous systems at once. And they do something that pure vigilance cannot do: they remind both the parent and the child that life contains more than danger.

Some specific things worth considering, not as obligations but as permissions:

Let your child teach you something they are interested in, even briefly. The shift in direction — from you managing them to them engaging you — activates the calming dynamic the research describes.

Physical closeness matters. Holding a child, being held by one, sitting in contact — these are not only emotionally comforting. They produce measurable physiological changes in both people. Seek them deliberately.

When your child laughs, let yourself laugh. This sounds simple. Under chronic stress it is not. But permitting moments of real joy — without immediately suppressing them because they feel incongruent with the surrounding reality — is one of the most psychologically protective things a parent in a war zone can do.

Fear and Joy Can Coexist

This last point connects to something the research on wartime parents found that surprised even the researchers. The parents who coped best were not those who maintained emotional steadiness. They were those who could hold contradictory feelings at the same time — fear alongside hope, grief alongside moments of real happiness. Psychologist Susan Folkman’s work established that positive and negative emotions are not opposites that cancel each other out. They can, and often do, exist together.

A parent who feels genuine delight playing with their child, even on a day when the news is terrible, is not being naive or irresponsible. They are doing something the research identifies as a mark of resilience. And the child who produces that delight is, in that moment, doing something real for the parent — something no one else in the parent’s life can quite replicate.

What I have tried to offer here is not a replacement for the psychological foundations described in my previous piece. It is an invitation to look more carefully at what the relationship with your child, in its depth and its biology, already makes available to you. The research has found it. It deserves to be said plainly: your child is not only someone you are protecting. In ways that are measurable and real, they are also protecting you.

Readers interested in the neurological framework underlying this piece can find a fuller discussion in ‘Changing the Odds: A New Understanding of PTSD and the Path to Recovery,’available on Amazon, Kindle, Barnes & Noble, and at ChangingTheOdds-PTSD.com.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)