By Evelyn Rappaport, Psy.D.P.C.
Five-year-old Adam speaks about the war with striking clarity. He distinguishes between different types of missiles and describes the current escalation of the Iran War as “less scary” than the 12-day Iranian war in June of 2025. His tone is calm, almost observational. Yet beneath his words lies a nervous system already learning to track threat, compare intensity, and make meaning of danger.
Twelve-year-old Ami moves quickly when the siren sounds. As he gathers his siblings and heads to the shelter, he pauses to collect two items that do not belong to him: his younger sister’s blanket and her stuffed animal. She is not home, yet he brings them anyway. “These are her love objects,” he explains, items she always carries into the shelter. In her absence, he becomes the guardian of her comfort, embodying care even when she is not present.
These small, quiet moments reveal something profound. Even amid uncertainty and danger, children are not only adapting, they are also organizing, protecting, and caring for one another. What we are witnessing is not simply coping; it is the lived expression of secure attachment under pressure.
Attachment as an Internal Shelter
Attachment theory has long emphasized that children develop a sense of safety through consistent, attuned caregiving (Bowlby, 1969/1982; Ainsworth et al., 1978). When caregivers respond to a child’s emotional needs with presence and reliability, children internalize a powerful expectation: I am not alone. Someone will come for me.
This internalized sense of safety becomes, in many ways, a psychological shelter, one that can be carried even into physically unsafe environments.
Securely attached children are not shielded from fear. They hear the sirens. They feel the tension in the air. Their bodies register danger. But alongside this heightened awareness, they also hold an embodied memory of protection, of being gathered, soothed, and accompanied.
From a neurobiological perspective, these repeated experiences of co-regulation help shape the developing nervous system. When a child is comforted during moments of distress, their physiological arousal is modulated through connection. Over time, this builds greater capacity for self-regulation, even under conditions of chronic stress (Porges, 2022; Feldman, 2020).
In this sense, secure attachment does not eliminate fear. It transforms the child’s relationship to it.
The Paradox of Safety Within Insecurity
There is a striking paradox in the lives of many Israeli children. They are growing up in one of the most chronically insecure environments in the world, marked by sirens, shelters, and an ongoing awareness of threat. Yet many demonstrate remarkable capacities for connection, empathy, and resilience.
Their nervous systems are shaped by dual forces: vigilance and protection.
On one hand, they develop a finely tuned sensitivity to danger, a kind of embodied alertness. On the other, they repeatedly experience being held within family systems that mobilize quickly to protect and soothe. Families gather in safe rooms. Siblings look after one another. Parents attempt, in whatever ways they can, to maintain emotional presence.
It is within this tension between fear and connection that resilience is formed.
Resilience, in this context, is not a trait that children either possess or lack. It is a relational process, emerging through repeated experiences of being supported, understood, and accompanied (Masten, 2014).
Remembering in the Body
Attachment Essential Reads
As I listen to these children, I am aware of how their experiences resonate with my own early memories. At four years old, during the Sinai War, I found myself in a bomb shelter in Haifa. My memory is not linear or narrative. It comes in fragments of sensory impressions more than stories. I remember it as something like a pajama gathering: families huddled together, sheets draped around us, candlelight softening the edges of fear.
What remains most vividly is not only the danger, but the togetherness within it.
These are what I think of as implicit or somatic memory experiences encoded in the body rather than in language. Early relational environments shape how the nervous system organizes itself, often long before we have the words to describe them (van der Kolk, 2014; Siegel, 2020).
They become templates for how we respond to stress, how we seek comfort, and how we relate to others across the lifespan.
Children as Carriers of Resilience
The stories of Adam and Ami are not extraordinary because they are rare. They are extraordinary because they are so common.
Children, even in the midst of threat, orient toward connection. They care for siblings. They preserve rituals. They carry forward the emotional threads that bind families together.
Ami’s act of bringing his sister’s cherished objects into the shelter is more than a thoughtful gesture. It is an expression of relational continuity of holding another in mind, even when she is absent. It reflects an internalized map of care: this matters to her, so it matters to me.
This is how resilience is transmitted not only through words, but through action, presence, and embodied knowing.
Research on resilience increasingly highlights the role of relationships as the central organizing force in adaptation to adversity (Masten, 2014; Feldman, 2020). Children do not develop resilience in isolation. They develop it in connection.
Holding Fear and Connection Together
It can be tempting to think of resilience as the ability to “overcome” fear or to remain unaffected by adversity. But the children I am listening to tell a different story.
They are afraid. They are vigilant. They are impacted.
And they are also connected.
Resilience, then, is not the absence of fear. It is the capacity to remain in relationship to oneself and to others while moving through it.
Secure attachment allows for this coexistence. It creates a foundation from which children can experience fear without being overwhelmed by it, because they are not alone in it.
What Children Teach Us
In their quiet, unassuming ways, children offer wisdom that is both simple and profound.
They remind us that safety is not only a physical condition, but a relational experience — that even in environments of uncertainty, the presence of attuned connection can shape how fear is metabolized. And that resilience is not something we summon in isolation, but something that emerges between us.
In a world that often feels unpredictable and fragile, children show us that what endures is not the absence of danger, but the persistence of connection.
Biography:
Dr. Evelyn Rappoport, Psy.D.P.C. is an NYS licensed Psychologist, Relational Psychoanalyst, and Somatic Trauma Specialist who integrates body/mind modalities for healing. She has a private practice in New York City and Jerusalem, where she sees individuals, families, and groups. She is a member of the Medicine and Addictions workgroup of the American Psychological Association’s Division 56 and Chair of the NYSPA Trauma Special Interest Group. She is A Distinguished Fellow, past president of the Division of Psychoanalysis, and currently serves as President of the NYSPA Trauma Special Interest group.
