Refugee children re-united with their parents in Norway:
interventions aiming to elaborate trauma, re-establish bonding and parental empowerment and support

Reunificacion de niños refugiados con sus padres en Noruega:
intervenciones orientadas a elaborar el trauma, restableciendo los vinculos de afecto y el fortalecimiento y apoyo de los padres

This presentation is based on research as well as clinical and consultation work with refugee parents and children re-united in Norway after several years of separation.

Refugees and immigrants settled in Norway have the right to apply for family reunification with spouse, children under eighteen years old, or with their parents when the refugee is a minor. Family reunifications are often the result of several years of longing and searching for each other, while going though long and demanding bureaucratic processes. All the involved - children, parents, as well as those working with them - become deeply involved and have great expectations of a successful reunion. This new period in a family life forces all members to experience some kind of re-adaptation and far too often seems to be threatened by unresolved grief, re-attachment difficulties, new roles within the family. The exigencies of a new country, language and school system while being under less fortunate socio-economical conditions is also an extra burden for re-united families. Parents may therefore fail to accomplish their children's expected role as omnipotent providers. Bonding between parents and children may have been severed due to separation. On the other hand both children and parents can be extra vulnerable after experiencing severe traumata under separation. Parents we have met -most often mothers- had undergone imprisonment, torture and/ or bereavement, which contributed to a numbing or "freezing" of normal, warm feelings in intimate relations. Children, however, could be grieving for loved grand parents or other family members who took care of them before reunion, but they may as well have been suffering from neglect and abuse while their parents were absent. Parental attempts to regain their lost role as primary carer for their children, asking for lessons and family chores to be done or setting limits to unwanted behaviour may pave the way for conflicts.

Among the challenges that family re-unification imposes to psycho-social professionals is how to help parents be sensitive to their children's needs after bereavement and eventual maltreatment as well as to support the re-establishing of bonding without interfering too much with the intimacy and dynamics of the family. Clinical cases and intervention examples will be discussed.