When Children Leave: Loneliness and Stress Shape Maternal Depression in Crisis-Hit Lebanon

When a child emigrates, parents around the world often describe a quiet grief, the ache of an empty bedroom and a phone call that has to be scheduled across time zones. In Lebanon, where an economic collapse, a banking crisis and successive shocks have pushed hundreds of thousands of young people to seek lives abroad, that grief might be expected to cut especially deep. Yet a new mixed-methods study from psychologists at Saint Joseph University of Beirut suggests that the picture is far more complicated than a simple equation of distance and despair. Published in Current Psychology, the research by Georges Chedid, Dana Kaj and Boutros Ghanem finds that whether a mother’s children live in Lebanon or overseas may matter less for her mental health than two forces that operate largely beneath the surface: loneliness and perceived stress.

The study set out to answer a deceptively simple question: does having children who have emigrated uniquely exacerbate maternal depression compared with having children who remain in the country? The researchers recruited 238 mothers and measured depressive symptoms using the Beck Depression Inventory-II, a widely used clinical instrument. They also administered the Perceived Stress Scale, in its validated Arabic version, and the UCLA Loneliness Scale, allowing them to quantify both how stressed mothers felt about their daily lives and how isolated they felt in their relationships. Crucially, the sample included mothers whose children lived in Lebanon and mothers whose children had moved abroad, permitting a direct statistical comparison between the two groups.

The headline quantitative result was, on its face, a null finding. Depression scores did not differ significantly between mothers with children in Lebanon and those with children abroad, and the effect sizes were trivially small. For anyone who has followed the international literature on so-called left-behind parents, which has linked adult child migration to poorer mental health among older adults in countries from India to Mexico, this might seem surprising. But the authors are careful about what their comparison can and cannot show. Formal equivalence testing, which asks whether two groups are statistically indistinguishable rather than merely failing to detect a difference, proved inconclusive. In other words, the data cannot confidently rule out either a meaningful similarity or a modest difference between the groups.

What the researchers propose instead is a provocative interpretation: the absence of a gap may reflect a shared national burden. When an entire society is living through a profound and multifaceted crisis, the psychological toll may be distributed so broadly that the specific stressor of a child’s emigration no longer stands out against the background noise. A mother whose children remain in Lebanon still watches the currency collapse, still queues for fuel and medicine, still worries about her children’s futures inside a failing economy. The qualitative arm of the study, involving in-depth interviews with 15 mothers, was designed to explore exactly this possibility and to illuminate the mechanisms hiding behind the averages.

Where the simple comparison failed, mediation analysis succeeded in revealing structure. Statistical mediation models test whether the relationship between two variables flows through a third. Here, the pathways diverged strikingly depending on where the children lived. Among mothers whose children remained in Lebanon, loneliness was associated with depressive symptoms indirectly through higher perceived stress: feeling relationally isolated appeared to amplify how threatening and unmanageable daily life seemed, and that amplified stress in turn tracked with depression. Among mothers whose children had emigrated, the arrow pointed the other way. For this group, perceived stress was associated with depression indirectly through greater relational loneliness, suggesting that the grinding pressure of survival in a collapsing economy may erode the social connections that normally buffer mental health.

These are correlational pathways, and the authors are explicit that the study cannot establish causation or direction over time. But the asymmetry is theoretically meaningful. It indicates that loneliness and perceived stress are not simply two labels for the same distress; they are distinct, salient correlates of depression that interact differently depending on a family’s migration circumstances. In crisis contexts, the findings suggest, environmental survival stress and relational loneliness operate as partly separable engines of maternal depressive symptoms, and interventions that treat them as interchangeable are likely to miss their targets.

The interviews give these statistical pathways a human vocabulary. Mothers with children abroad reported a paradox: relief that their children were safe, coupled with what participants described as an imposed grief, a mourning for living children who are still reachable by phone but no longer present in the texture of everyday life. One image that emerged from the qualitative analysis was an architecture of emptiness, a description of how emigration severs a mother’s connection to daily routines, spaces and relationships, leaving the physical and social scaffolding of family life hollowed out. The phrase captures something that a depression score alone cannot: the way absence reorganizes a home, a neighborhood and a sense of self.

At the same time, mothers whose children stayed in Lebanon described their own burdens, dominated not by separation but by the relentless logistics of survival in a country where basic services have frayed. This convergence supports the idea of a shared national burden and echoes the concept of structural violence, the harm inflicted by political and economic arrangements rather than by any single actor, which the authors situate their work within. In such an environment, the difference between having a child in Beirut and having a child in Paris may be psychologically smaller than the shared experience of raising children, near or far, inside a collapsing state.

The study’s design carries both strengths and limits worth keeping in view. The combination of quantitative scales with thematic analysis, following the approach of Braun and Clarke, allows numbers and narratives to check and enrich one another, and the use of validated Arabic-language instruments strengthens measurement in this linguistic context. But the sample is modest, the mediation models are cross-sectional, and equivalence testing was inconclusive, so the null comparison should be read as provisional rather than definitive. The authors also note that the datasets are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request, and that the work received no external funding, with ethical approval obtained in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki.

The practical implications are perhaps the most urgent part of the findings. The authors argue that mental health interventions in Lebanon must move beyond uniform approaches and instead target two distinct mechanisms: survival stress mitigation and relational reconnection, for mothers of both migrated and non-migrated children. Concretely, that could mean programs that reduce the daily friction of obtaining food, medicine and cash, alongside structured opportunities to rebuild social ties that economic precarity has worn away. At the same time, the study insists that individual therapy cannot substitute for addressing the overarching structural conditions affecting all families. As long as the crisis persists, the silent burden will be carried not only by mothers at airport gates, but by every mother in Lebanon, and the most effective response will have to operate at the scale of the society that produced it.

Subject of Research: Loneliness and perceived stress as pathways linking child emigration to maternal depressive symptoms in Lebanon

Article Title: The silent burden: Loneliness and perceived stress as pathways linking child emigration to maternal depressive symptoms in Lebanon

Article References: The silent burden: Loneliness and perceived stress as pathways linking child emigration to maternal depressive symptoms in Lebanon. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10174-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10174-w

Keywords: maternal depression, child emigration, Lebanon, loneliness, perceived stress, mixed-methods, migration and mental health, structural violence, Beck Depression Inventory, UCLA Loneliness Scale, left-behind parents, Current Psychology