The backdrop to the study is one of the largest displacement crises in the Americas. Between 2010 and 2023, the Venezuelan population in the United States grew from 184,000 to 770,000, driven by an economic, political, and humanitarian collapse that pushed roughly 6 million citizens to flee generalized violence, poverty, food insecurity, and political persecution. Many families reached the U.S. only after days of hiking through the Darién Gap, a crossing that requires paid guides, takes four to ten days, and exposes migrants to drowning, dehydration, injury, and sexual violence. Crossings through the jungle surged from 130,000 people in 2021 to more than 500,000 by the end of 2023, with Venezuelans accounting for more crossings than any other nationality. Children under 18 made up 21 percent of all crossings in 2023, up from 16 percent the year before, a statistic that reflects how many families with young children undertook the journey.

The research team, led by Andrea C. Buhler-Wassmann of the University of Wisconsin-Madison together with collaborators at Loyola University Chicago, New York University, and the University of California, Santa Cruz, drew on a larger project called Ciencia en relatos, which investigates how Latine families use storytelling to teach children about science and nature. Seven Venezuelan mothers living in Chicago and New York City, with an average age of about 30 and children between 38 and 71 months old, were recorded telling oral stories in Spanish during home visits. The sessions were transcribed using ELAN software and CHAT conventions, and the team conducted a thematic analysis blending deductive stress-and-coping theory with inductive code development. Bilingual, bicultural Latina researchers co-coded the videos collaboratively, working to 100 percent consensus at the utterance level and carefully translating culturally specific expressions.

The analysis revealed two distinct narrative genres. Four mothers told autobiographical reminiscing stories, personal memory narratives of experiences they had shared with their children, positioning the child as a direct participant in a real event. Three mothers told fictionalized stories based on real-life events, casting invented characters, often resembling the family, in the jungle journey. The researchers interpret this fictionalizing as a coping strategy in itself: by transforming lived trauma into a fictional account, mothers create a protective psychological buffer that lets children approach distressing experiences obliquely rather than directly. In the fictionalized stories, mothers and children regularly switched between third person and first person, a linguistic marker of the closeness between the characters’ experiences and the family’s own.

Across the seven stories, the team identified six adaptive coping strategies. The first was transparency about dangers and stressors. Rather than shielding their children, mothers named the threats directly, from predatory animals and treacherous rivers to riding atop La Bestia, the freight train network known as El Tren de la Muerte, or the Train of Death. In one autobiographical story, a mother recalled her child hearing growling that sounded like a lion or tiger; in a fictionalized story, a child described a puma circling the camp and connected the danger to el lobo feroz, the Big Bad Wolf of storybooks. When a 4-year-old co-constructing a story said the girl in the tale was scared to swim with the crocodiles, the mother answered simply that the girl had to cross the river anyway, framing the crossing as necessary regardless of fear.

The second strategy, cognitive reappraisal, appeared in four stories, particularly in response to children’s fear. Mothers reframed the journey as manageable or even positive, redirecting narratives toward safety. In one fictionalized story, a mother cast her child as el superhéroe morenito, the Brown superhero, and told him the jungle journey was a camping trip whenever he felt scared, directing his attention toward bathing in the rivers. When a child said a crocodile ate the girl in the story, the mother absorbed the contribution and transformed its outcome, retelling that the girl fought the crocodile, which fled whimpering. In one of the most striking moments in the data, a 5-year-old independently extended the reappraisal, adding a scene in which the superhero sends the Train of Death far away and replaces it with a train of corazoncitos, little hearts, to save those making the journey. The researchers read this as evidence that reappraisal was not only modeled by mothers but internalized and extended by the children themselves.

Social connection and support emerged as a third strategy, moving in both directions within the caregiver-child relationship. One child gave his mother the encouragement to keep going, while the mother simultaneously strengthened her son, who shed his fear because he had her embrace. Mothers described carrying resting children on their backs as charging their batteries, and one wove the image into the story playfully, imagining her child as a little monkey clinging to his parents as they climbed the mountain. Support also came from strangers encountered along the way, who provided food, blankets, shoes, and places to bathe, and in moments of acute danger, held onto one another as a swollen river swept people away. At the border, two strangers reimagined as fellow superheroes helped the mother and son cross the wall safely. The researchers note that these accounts convey a counternarrative in which community is not a given but something built in motion among people on the same perilous path.

Nature itself emerged as a paradoxical resource. Five mothers described rivers as sources of hygiene, relief from heat, play, and navigation, even as the same rivers posed serious dangers. Children in the stories explored rocks, leaves, animal feathers, and river water, and one mother acted out her child’s joy with her whole body, dipping imaginary little feet and scooping water. One family’s story wove spirituality through the landscape: when a puma appeared, the characters prayed to God for protection and the puma left, and when the child asked why there were so many stars, the mother answered that the brightness of God’s eyes was reflected in them. The mother also held space for mystery, describing voices of women crying by the river with no one there, and sounds from the mountains that might have been trees falling or possibly walking, a mode of knowing the child eagerly joined rather than corrected.

Empowerment messages ran through three stories, affirming children’s positive characteristics and racial and ethnic identities, including that being Brown is beautiful. When one child named their poverty directly, the mother transformed the acknowledgment into a declaration of strength, saying they were poor but strong and kept fighting, and the child echoed the words back, repeating strong, strong, strong and fighting and fighting in what the researchers describe as internalization happening in the telling itself. One mother closed her superhero story in the language of fairy tales, with the family reunited and hugging tight, tight, tight, and now living happily ever after, deliberately anchoring the child’s ultimate takeaway in safety and familial connection rather than permanent fear.

The authors argue that the findings underscore the critical role narrative plays as a coping mechanism during periods of high stress, and that cultural stress theory should be expanded to include migration journey-related stressors and protective factors such as storytelling, cognitive reframing, empowerment, and support from family, community, spirituality, and the natural world. Viewed through the community cultural wealth framework, the stories are rich in linguistic, aspirational, familial, social, navigational, and resistance capital, transforming lived experience into a pedagogical resource that counters dominant narratives of what counts as valuable knowledge. The researchers caution that the sample is small and self-selected, that psychological functions of storytelling are presented as possibilities rather than demonstrated outcomes, and that no quantitative measures of child wellbeing were included. Still, the children’s responses suggest they are not passive observers of migration adversity but active co-constructors of the family’s survival narrative, using imagination to transform systemic violence into conquerable hurdles. The study was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation and published on 24 September 2026.

Subject of Research: Developmental Psychology

Article Title: How Venezuelan mothers and their young children use storytelling to process immigration journeys

Article References: Buhler-Wassmann, A. C., Villanueva, A., Navarro Chavez, J., Melzi, G., Callanan, M. A., & Haden, C. A. (2026). How Venezuelan mothers and their young children use storytelling to process immigration journeys. Frontiers in Developmental Psychology, 4, Article 1910152. https://doi.org/10.3389/fdpys.2026.1910152

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fdpys.2026.1910152

Keywords: Venezuelan migration, Darién Gap, family storytelling, cognitive reappraisal, resilience, preschool children, immigrant families, coping strategies, developmental psychology, Latine families, community cultural wealth, Frontiers in Developmental Psychology