ABSTRACT
In their study of children in London in World War II during the German Blitz, Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham (1943) observed that children who were separated from their families in the city and sent to safe havens were much more traumatized than children who remained with their family in the bombarded city. They concluded that the disruption of family ties is more traumatic to children than the events of war. Thus they laid the foundation for conceptualizing family bonds as a protective factor for children in times of mass trauma, long before concepts of resilience and protective factors had been developed.
