Advances in Migrant Children’s Well-Being and Mental Health

Dear Colleagues,

The unprecedented waves of voluntary and involuntary migration have created an increasingly urgent need to better understand how migrant families adapt to their new communities. According to UNICEF (2022), there are 37 million migrant children around the world. On the one hand, migrant families face significant pre- and post-migratory experiences that increase risk of mental health difficulties, and these include war trauma and violence, poverty, racial discrimination, intra-familial violence and other acculturative stressors. On the other hand, migrant families also demonstrate significant resilience, which is often attributed to factors such as traditional family processes, religion and coping mechanisms. Despite evidence for both migrant risk and resilience, there are important gaps in the literature on (a) vulnerable families who live under conditions of significant poverty and limited access to resources including host language competence; and (b) culturally sensitive approaches to mental health and interventions.

The goal of this Special Issue to understand factors that promote resilience and increase the risk of mental health and adjustment difficulties in migrant families with children and adolescents. A particular aim of this issue is view family processes and relationships from a cultural perspective, as well as explore culturally sensitive approaches to measuring mental health, resilience and interventions.

Papers can focus on:

• Inter-parental relationships and intra-familial violence in migrant families and parent–child relationships and outcomes;
• Longitudinal studies examining the adaptions of migrant families over time;
• Barriers to positive parent–child relationships upon relationships and cultural processes that affect these relationships;
• Culturally appropriate interventions implemented with migrant families;
• Social network research and migrant adaptation;
• Qualitative and quantitative, multiple informant studies.

Dr. Irene Vitoroulis
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Children is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• immigration
• migration
• migrant children
• migrant families
• refugees
• mental health
• parent–child relationships