How War Rewires Family Minds: Iranian Mothers and Children Reveal Two Distinct Anxiety Pathways

When war ends, the shelling stops, but the mind keeps firing. A new study of 343 Iranian mothers and their young children, published in Frontiers in Psychiatry, offers one of the most detailed statistical portraits yet of how military conflict seeps into family psychology—and the picture it paints is more surprising than a simple story of trauma flowing from parent to child. Drawing on an extended version of the classic transactional model of stress and coping, the researchers found that war-related stressors hit children directly and hard, while mothers’ anxiety was shaped less by the raw exposure itself and more by how they mentally framed and coped with it. The model explained a remarkable 80 percent of the variance in maternal anxiety and 72 percent in child anxiety—figures that are unusually high for psychological research and signal that the framework captures something real about how families process catastrophe.

The study was conducted roughly three months after the June 2025 Iran–Israel military conflict, a 12-day escalation that began on 13 June and ended with a ceasefire on 24 June. The research team, led by Nie Ni of Guangxi Minzu Normal University together with colleagues at the University of Religions and Denominations in Qom and Universiti Putra Malaysia, recruited a stratified proportional sample of mothers aged 24 and older, each with at least one child between 5 and 10 years old living in conflict-affected areas. Just over half of the mothers—58 percent—reported being displaced by the war, and nearly 89 percent lived in Tehran, with the remainder in other affected provinces. Participants completed validated Persian-language questionnaires measuring war stressor exposure, cognitive appraisal, coping strategies, religiosity, social support, maternal anxiety on the GAD-7 scale, and child anxiety on the SCARED scale, with data analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling.

The theoretical backbone of the study is the Transactional Model of Stress and Coping developed by Richard Lazarus and Susan Folkman in the 1980s. The model’s central insight is deceptively simple: stress is not a property of events themselves but of the transaction between a person and their environment. An event becomes stressful only when it is appraised as significant to well-being and as taxing or exceeding available coping resources. Primary appraisal asks whether an event is irrelevant, benign, or stressful—and if stressful, whether it represents harm already done, a looming threat, or a challenge that might be mastered. Secondary appraisal then evaluates what resources one has to meet the demand. This is why two people exposed to the same bombardment can emerge with entirely different psychological outcomes: the mind’s interpretation, not just the event, drives the distress.

The researchers extended this framework by weaving in sociocultural resources—religiosity and social support—as potential moderators, and by testing a battery of specific mediating pathways. Their hypotheses were ambitious: that war stressors would raise anxiety in both mothers and children, that threat and challenge appraisals would mediate those links, that problem-focused coping, cognitive restructuring, and emotion-focused coping would each carry indirect effects, that maternal anxiety would spill over into child anxiety, and that faith and social networks would buffer the psychological blow. Eleven hypotheses in total were put to the test with 5,000-resample bootstrapping and rigorous checks on reliability, convergent validity, and discriminant validity.

The results delivered a striking asymmetry. War-related stressors were directly and powerfully associated with child anxiety (β = 0.60, p < .001), confirming that children in middle childhood absorb the psychological impact of conflict with little cognitive filtering. But the same direct path to maternal anxiety was essentially flat (β = 0.014, p = .910)—a null result that contradicted the team’s first hypothesis and much of the prior literature documenting strong associations between war exposure and maternal distress. Instead, mothers’ anxiety traveled through indirect routes: challenge appraisal, problem-focused coping, and cognitive restructuring each significantly mediated the relationship between war stressors and maternal anxiety. In other words, mothers who could reframe the war as a challenge rather than a pure threat, who took active problem-solving steps, and who cognitively restructured their interpretation of events were substantially protected, even at high levels of exposure.

For children, the picture was different again. Threat appraisal did not mediate the stressor-to-child-anxiety link, suggesting that young children’s anxiety responds more to objective exposure than to subjective interpretation—perhaps because their coping resources are less developed and they depend heavily on caregivers for emotional regulation. Meanwhile, emotion-focused coping positively mediated the relationship between war stressors and child anxiety, meaning that when mothers leaned on emotion-regulation strategies, the pathway to child anxiety was strengthened rather than dampened. The authors interpret this cautiously: emotion-focused coping is not inherently maladaptive, but in contexts of ongoing, uncontrollable warfare it may signal fewer emotional resources available for supporting children’s regulation, or may model avoidance-based strategies that children then absorb.

Maternal anxiety did significantly predict child anxiety (β = 0.28, p = .016), consistent with the intergenerational transmission literature and with recent wartime research showing that maternal psychological functioning shapes children’s adjustment. But the effect was comparatively modest next to the direct war-stressor effect on children. The authors conclude that this is not a story of simple one-directional transmission from mother to child. Instead, they propose a dual-pathway family stress model: children are directly hammered by war-related stressors, while maternal anxiety operates as a secondary, partial contributor within a broader family system of shared trauma. This framing echoes findings from Kosovar families studied 11 years after their war, where no maternal-child anxiety association was found—suggesting that transmission effects may be strongest in the immediate aftermath of conflict and fade with time.

Two protective factors emerged with real force. Religiosity significantly moderated the relationship between war stressors and maternal anxiety, weakening the positive association at higher levels of faith engagement. The religious coping measure, which included prayer, fasting, Quranic recitation, and seeking guidance from religious leaders, showed high internal consistency (α = .91) and was culturally adapted to Iranian Islamic practice. Social support similarly buffered the stressor-anxiety link for mothers, consistent with the classic buffering hypothesis articulated by Cohen and Wills in 1985. Notably, however, social support did not moderate the relationship between war stressors and child anxiety—a null finding that contrasts with other research on parental reflective functioning and suggests that children’s protection may flow through different channels, such as maternal self-efficacy and parent-child communication, rather than through general social networks.

The methodological rigor of the study deserves attention. The measurement model passed Fornell–Larcker and HTMT discriminant validity checks, all average variance extracted values exceeded the 0.50 threshold, and model fit indices (SRMR = 0.068 for the estimated model, NFI > 0.90) met accepted standards. Common method bias was addressed through anonymous collection, item randomization, and Harman’s single-factor test, which showed the first unrotated factor accounted for well below the 40 percent threshold. Still, the authors are candid about limitations: the cross-sectional design cannot establish causal ordering, child anxiety was measured by maternal report rather than child self-report, and the sample was predominantly highly educated and urban—nearly 45 percent held a master’s degree or higher—which may limit generalizability to rural or less-educated populations.

The practical implications are concrete. The findings point toward cognitive-behavioral interventions that help mothers reframe war experiences from threats into challenges, training in problem-solving and cognitive restructuring, and caution against overreliance on emotion-focused coping in children. They also argue for culturally sensitive integration of religious and spiritual resources—prayer, spiritual counseling, engagement with religious leaders—alongside family-based and community mobilization approaches. Perhaps most importantly, the study’s timing, three months after active conflict ceased, identifies a critical window for early, multi-level intervention delivered through schools, health centers, and religious institutions. In a region where armed conflict repeatedly reshapes family life, understanding that mothers and children follow distinct psychological pathways through the same war may be the key to designing aid that actually works—treating the family as a system rather than assuming that healing the parent automatically heals the child.

Subject of Research: War-related stressors, cognitive appraisal, coping strategies, and anxiety among Iranian mothers and their children after military conflict

Article Title: Understanding anxiety disorders among Iranian mothers and their children exposed to conflict using an extended transactional model of stress and coping

Article References: Ni, N., Osati, Z., Zaremohzzabieh, Z., Ahrari, S., & Abdullah, H. (2026). Understanding anxiety disorders among Iranian mothers and their children exposed to conflict using an extended transactional model of stress and coping. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 17, Article 1839849. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2026.1839849

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fpsyt.2026.1839849

Keywords: war-related stressors, maternal anxiety, child anxiety, transactional model of stress and coping, cognitive appraisal, coping strategies, religiosity, social support, Iran, military conflict, PLS-SEM, family mental health