Introduction

Children in crisis migrant families who flee their home countries for reasons related to safety and survival face stressful migration journeys that threaten their mental and physical health (Barajas-Gonzalez et al., 2021; Salas-Wright et al., 2024; Vos et al., 2021). Nurturing protective parenting can buffer children from the emotional and physical consequences of early life stress in ways that promote resilience and positive development in contexts of adversity (Masten, 2018; Parmar et al., 2023). When mothers discuss emotions and provide coherent explanations to their children about stressful events that they experienced together, children develop an understanding that ultimately supports their psychological wellbeing (Sales and Fivush, 2005). Through family storytelling, caregivers can help their children process emotions and foster personal empowerment in the face of complex and stressful experiences in their lives (Koenig Kellas and Trees, 2006; Pereñíguez et al., 2025). In other words, meaning-making through narratives facilitates coping (Graci et al., 2018). In the present qualitative study, we explored how Venezuelan immigrant mothers and their preschool-aged children used storytelling to process and cope as they related their experiences migrating through the rainforest in the Darién Gap as they fled from crises in Venezuela and ultimately arrived in the United States.

Crossing the Darién Gap

The population of Venezuelans living in the United States increased dramatically from 184,000 in 2010 to 770,000 in 2023 (Amaya and Batalova, 2025). This increase was a response to the economic, political, and humanitarian crisis in Venezuela that prompted the mass displacement of 6 million of its citizens who were fleeing generalized violence, poverty, food insecurity, economic disempowerment, lack of access to health care and education, and political persecution (Freier and Doña-Reveco, 2022; Salas-Wright et al., 2025; Sobczak-Szelc et al., 2025) concerns that Venezuelan parents themselves identified as central to their decision to leave (Alpysbekova et al., 2024).

To arrive in the U.S., many Venezuelan migrants took dangerous routes through the Darién Gap, a roughly 10,000 square mile tropical jungle spanning northern Colombia and southern Panamá with no roads or bridges (Yates and Pappier, 2023). Land-based crossings—the more common route—require paid guides and take 4–10 days to cross and consist of hiking up mountains, down valleys, and across rivers (Yates and Pappier, 2023). Hazards include drowning, illness and dehydration from drinking river water, injury on dangerous trails, and the risk of robbery, rape, and sexual abuse. Maritime routes are faster but cost $1,000–$2,000 making them far less accessible. After crossing, migrants reach Indigenous communities in Panamá where they are registered and receive basic support—though Yates and Pappier (2023) describe it as wholly insufficient given the scale and peril of the journey, with serious gaps in medical care, food, clean water, and interpretation services.

Crossings through the Darién Gap grew from 130,000 people in 2021 to nearly 250,000 in 2022 and surpassed 500,000 by the end of 2023 (Yates and Pappier, 2023). Venezuelans drove much of this increase, accounting for over 150,000 crossings in 2022 and more than 209,000 between January and August 2023 alone, more than any other nationality. Children under 18 accounted for 21% of all crossings in 2023, up from 16% in 2022, reflecting the large number of families making this journey (Yates and Pappier, 2023). Migrant mothers traveling with children were among the most vulnerable, as gender, caregiving responsibilities, immigration status, and racialized border enforcement compounded their exposure to environmental dangers, sexual violence, extortion, and unmet health needs (Yates and Pappier, 2023).

Families' adaptive coping with immigration-related stress

Much of the existing literature on how families cope with immigration-related stress focuses on post-migration cultural stress within Latin American-heritage communities, with emerging research specifically addressing the Venezuelan diaspora (Salas-Wright et al., 2024). Cultural stress theory posits that immigration- and acculturation-related stressors, particularly those related to the experiences of othering, rejection, or hostility in the host country, compromise family functioning and psychological wellbeing (Hill et al., 2024; Meca and Schwartz, 2024; Salas-Wright et al., 2021). However, for Venezuelan crisis migrant families with young children, these post-migration stressors are compounded by pre-migration crisis exposure and dangerous migration journeys. Families face material hardship, psychological desperation, physical danger, unplanned departure, and discrimination that can impact their mental health, leading to heightened anxiety and PTSD symptoms (Carroll et al., 2025; Galvez et al., 2025; Rodriguez et al., 2021; Salas-Wright et al., 2021, 2024). Within this high-risk context, mothers traveling with young children are particularly vulnerable to threats to physical health and emotional trauma (Pineros-Leano et al., 2025). Young children have limited abilities to cope with stress on their own, so they rely on maternal co-regulation to navigate emotion and physiological distress (Buhler-Wassmann and Hibel, 2021).

Adaptive coping, the cognitive and behavioral efforts used to manage distress and support wellbeing, serves as a critical buffer against migration-related stress (Chaaya et al., 2025). For immigrant families, this coping is often communal, involving communication about stressors, shared emotional processing, and collaborative problem solving (Lyons et al., 1998; Wlodarczyk et al., 2016). Cognitive reappraisal is a primary adaptive coping strategy wherein individuals reinterpret a stressful situation in order to alter its meaning and change the situation's emotional impact (Okumura et al., 2022). Venezuelan immigrants with strong social support reported being better able to reappraise stressful events to foster more positive and less negative emotions (Okumura et al., 2022). Receiving emotional or instrumental support through interpersonal relationships and community support networks enables individuals to cope with stress, in part by discussing difficult emotions with trusted others (Galvez et al., 2025; Okumura et al., 2022). In the absence of these supportive relationships, Venezuelan immigrants reported higher emotional suppression (Okumura et al., 2022). Similarly, spirituality is another way that Venezuelan immigrants cope with stress, as their faith and relationship with God provides an outlet for expressing fears and negative emotions and enables them to stay positive (Abrams et al., 2022). Spirituality and religiosity protect against immigration-related trauma and promote emotional wellbeing (Holle, 2025). Exposure to natural environments is also known to reduce physiological and psychological stress (Shuda et al., 2020); however, less has been documented about how individuals leverage these landscapes as a coping mechanism during perilous migration journeys. Overall, immigrant families' adaptive coping strategies draw from intrinsic resources, such as cognitive reappraisal, spirituality, and courage, and external resources, like relying on supportive family, community relationships, and natural environments (Garcini et al., 2022; Gonzalez et al., 2022; Holle, 2025; Salas-Wright et al., 2021; Shuda et al., 2020).

Understanding how adaptive coping strategies are transmitted intergenerationally between mothers and children is essential for conceptualizing immigrant family adversity. Existing research suggests that Latina mothers are more likely to encourage their young children's emotional expression, help them solve problems, and coach them through difficult emotions than to ignore, distract, or punish children for expressing distress (Buhler-Wassmann and Hibel, 2026; Gamble et al., 2007). When Latina mothers possess high self-efficacy in active coping strategies, including emotional validation and problem-solving, they effectively scaffold their school-aged children's responses to stress and prosocial behaviors (Power et al., 2022). Latina mothers' commitment to their adolescent children's wellbeing and safety enabled them to find strength and perseverance in stressful moments (Alvarez-Frank et al., 2026). However, they used different strategies to protect their children in contexts of stress. Some mothers engaged in protective buffering by selectively withholding information about immigration-related stressors and discrimination, while others, particularly Afro-Latina mothers, confronted systemic stress through explicit, direct discussion (Alvarez-Frank et al., 2026). Collectively, this literature underscores that communicating about stressful experiences with their children creates opportunities for Latina immigrant mothers to model coping strategies, validate emotions, and transmit wisdom, values, and life lessons (Alvarez-Frank et al., 2026; Power et al., 2022). Empirical evidence regarding the specific adaptive coping strategies that Venezuelan immigrant mothers use to scaffold their young children's stress related to their actual migration journeys remains sparse.

Using storytelling to cope with stressful experiences

Stories serve as socially and culturally shaped vehicles for communicating lived or imagined experiences, and the process of family storytelling constructs cultural knowledge, shapes social relationships, and fortifies identity (Bruner, 1996; Fivush, 2019; Fivush and Haden, 2003; Fivush and Merrill, 2016). Beyond merely recounting the past, storytelling about migration is another way of coping with adversity (Cáceres-Titos et al., 2025). By co-constructing stories about shared migration experiences, children learn how to structure, organize, and make meaning of life-changing events (Fivush et al., 2006). By 3 or 4 years of age, children become actively engaged in the storytelling process by asking questions and adding key elements to the story, contributing to their developing understanding of the world, their families, and their communities (Bohanek et al., 2006; Fivush and Merrill, 2016).

Caregivers tell these immigration journey stories in ways that align with their particular goals, which may include transmitting certain values and knowledge, anchoring their children to family or cultural heritage, and actively helping children process difficult family experiences (Kulkofsky et al., 2009; Koenig Kellas and Trees, 2006; Wang and Fivush, 2005). Through narratives, families can reinterpret, rather than erase, dangerous and traumatic experiences. Storytelling about migration journeys may facilitate emotional relief of social suffering, validate children's complex emotions, and foster empowerment amidst structural vulnerability (Pereñíguez et al., 2025). By guiding children through stressful and uncertain narratives with warm and responsive caregiving, mothers mediate their children's distress and turn shared trauma into collective resilience (Parmar et al., 2023).

Families construct stories through distinct narrative genres, including autobiographical reminiscing and fictionalized family stories, that offer unique socio-emotional mechanisms for processing stress and trauma. Autobiographical reminiscing involves caregivers and children co-constructing accounts of jointly experienced past events (Fivush, 2019). During autobiographical stories, mothers often invite their children to be active collaborators in the storytelling and elaborate on shared events by asking them questions about what they experienced. Conceptually, this genre positions the child as a direct participant in a real, shared event, requiring them to explicitly integrate potentially stressful memories into their developing sense of self. In contrast, fictionalized family stories represent a separate narrative genre. Caregivers, particularly within Latine families, frequently craft fictionalized narratives based on family experiences that utilize invented or fantastical elements, often casting the child or their peers as characters (Melzi and Caspe, 2005). Thematically and therapeutically, this fictional genre provides a vital framework of narrative distance. By transforming lived experiences of stress and trauma into a fictionalized account, caregivers create a protective psychological buffer, allowing children to approach and process highly distressing experiences obliquely rather than directly. Using stories that include subjective experiences similar to those experienced by the child enables their identification with the characters and allows for them to safely explore the reality presented, express emotions, and find new meanings for difficult experiences (Valenzuela-Pérez et al., 2014). Both narrative genres emerge clearly within the present data and the distinction is analytically meaningful (Buhler-Wassmann et al., 2026), revealing how families utilize both direct processing and protective distancing to recount migration journeys through storytelling.

The present study

We apply an emic, within-culture approach that centers the lived experiences of Venezuelan families, recognizing them as experts of their own realities (Jahoda, 1989; Yosso, 2005). The present study is grounded in sociocultural theories that emphasize that cognitive development and emotional regulation are socially mediated, occurring through dynamic, everyday interactions with their families and communities (Rogoff, 2003; Vygotsky, 1978). Within this framework, language and family storytelling are the primary mechanisms through which children learn to make sense of adversity in culturally specific ways. When mothers and children collaboratively construct immigration journey narratives, children actively process these experiences and gradually internalize the communicative tools, emotional scripts, and adaptive coping strategies their mothers model (Fivush, 2019). Rather than viewing these interactions as mere reflections of past events, we conceptualize the oral stories shared between Venezuelan mothers and their children as vital familial, linguistic, and cultural resources—forms of community cultural wealth that explicitly scaffold children's psychological resilience and adaptive coping amidst immigration-related stress (González et al., 2013; Meca and Schwartz, 2024; Rogoff, 2003; Salas-Wright et al., 2021; Yosso, 2005).

The community cultural wealth (CCW) perspective (Yosso, 2005) explains that immigrant families with limited financial resources possess aspirational, linguistic, familial, social, navigational, and resistance capital. This framework builds upon the Funds of Knowledge approach (Moll et al., 1992), which recognizes families' socio-cultural knowledge, skills, and practices as essential sources for children's learning and adaptive functioning. CCW validates storytelling, transnational histories, and testimonios (testimonies) as asset-based pedagogies that guide children's moral and social development and autonomy (Díaz Lara et al., 2025; Yosso, 2005). Through stories, mothers pass down vital coping strategies and cultural values to their children (Elias and Brown, 2022). Intergenerational storytelling leverages forms of cultural wealth that promote community wellbeing when facing challenges, providing instrumental and emotional support needed to navigate hostile social structures (Yosso, 2005). Rather than viewing these narratives through a deficit lens, CCW allows us to interpret shared oral histories as active tools for fostering resilience under anti-immigrant stress and maintaining familial bonds (Ayón et al., 2010; Bylund, 2003; Elias and Brown, 2022). Ultimately, CCW provides a critical lens for interpreting mother-child stories about their experiences through the Darién Gap as forms of cultural wealth, sustained by Venezuelan caregivers to help their young children process stressful contexts.

The present study explores storytelling as a core strategy through which Venezuelan immigrant mothers help their young children process the traumatic and stressful experience of migrating from Venezuela to the United States. Nested within a larger study investigating storytelling and science learning in Latine family and community contexts (n = 226), this qualitative study focuses on a subset of seven Venezuelan mothers living in Chicago and New York City. When prompted to share a science- or nature-related story with their children, these mothers uniquely leveraged the prompt to recount their own immigration journeys through the Darién Gap. Guided by thematic analysis, the present study addresses the research question: What adaptive coping strategies do mothers utilize in these shared narratives to help their preschool-aged children process their immigration journeys?

Method

Participants

Seven Venezuelan mothers and their children in this study lived in Chicago, IL (n = 5) and New York City, NY (n = 2) during data collection in 2023–2024, when Venezuelans were eligible for Temporary Protected Status and humanitarian parole programs that provided legal authorization to live and work in the United States. Families arrived in the U.S. between 2022 and 2024, and both cities ranked among the top U.S. metropolitan areas of residence for Venezuelan immigrants during that period (Amaya and Batalova, 2025). The mothers were on average 29.71 years old (SD = 2.69) at the time of data collection. They reported their years of formal education in Venezuela, which was equivalent to an average of 12.64 years (SD = 2.75; range = 8–16) of formal education in the U.S. Two of the mothers reported being employed part-time in the U.S. (n = 1 Chicago, n = 1 New York City). Two of the five families from Chicago reported an annual household income of “Less than $25,000” and one reported between $25,000–$49,999; the remaining two did not know their annual family income. The two families from New York City were enrolled at a Head Start, and met the poverty guideline to be enrolled at the early childcare center.

The children in the sample (n = 3 female; n = 4 male) were between 3 and 6 years old (M = 53.57 months, SD = 13.72, range: 38–71 months), and all were born in Venezuela except for one child whose parents are from Venezuela, but the child was born in Colombia during the family's immigration journey. In six families, children spoke and heard more Spanish than English at home; in one family, Spanish was the only language used.

Procedure

All procedures in the present study were part of a larger project (Buhler-Wassmann et al., 2026; Haden et al., 2023) approved by the New York University Institutional Review Board. Researchers collaborated with community partners to distribute bilingual Spanish-English flyers inviting Latine caregivers to participate in a study about how children learn, particularly about science and nature. Chicago-based families were recruited between October 2023 and October 2024 from community partnerships with a local museum, preschool centers, and nonprofit organizations serving Latine families. New York-based families were recruited between May and November 2023 through a partnering Head Start center serving Spanish-speaking Latine families with preschool-aged children. Study visits took place in a private space at community centers, one family at a time.

Each family met for two visits led in Spanish, the families' chosen language, by Spanish-English bilingual bicultural Latine researchers and scheduled in accordance to the families' availability, usually 1 week apart. The researchers introduced themselves, expressed gratitude and appreciation for the caregivers, built rapport with families, and were aware of researcher-participant power dynamics, consciously positioning the caregivers as the experts on their children's experiences and learning. During the first visit, participating mothers gave consent for themselves and permission for their children to participate. The first session was with just the mother, and involved a semi-structured interview about storytelling and science learning. During the second visit, mothers engaged with their children in three activities, oral story, book sharing, adivinanzas/riddles, and then the mothers answered two questionnaires on demographics and literacy activities. Each visit lasted between 45 and 60 min. Families received a $20 gift card after their first visit, and a $25 gift card after their second visit.

The present study focused on one activity at the beginning of the second visit in which mothers were invited to share a science- or nature-related oral story with their preschool-aged children and were audio and video recorded doing so. All but one of the mothers in this study were given instructions at the end of the first visit to think about a science or nature-related oral story to tell during their next visit. One mother was asked to generate a story at the beginning of the second visit, after this procedural change was made at the suggestion of the New York City Head Start family coordinators who wanted to minimize any feelings of anxiety or pressure that might accompany having to prepare a story in advance. Families were audio and video recorded during the storytelling and encouraged to engage freely and interact as they normally would. At the end of the second visit, mothers responded to an open-ended question regarding their oral story selection: “What story did you share and why?”

The larger project of 226 families (Buhler-Wassmann et al., 2026; Haden et al., 2023) included a total of 16 Venezuelan families, all of whom arrived in the United States between 2022–2024 (two Venezuelan caregivers did not disclose the year they arrived in the US). The present study includes only the seven Venezuelan caregivers who chose to share a story about their migration journey as a response to the oral story prompt. The other nine Venezuelan caregivers told science or nature oral stories about different topics (e.g., reminiscing about a family farm, animals, and outdoor recreation; telling fictional stories about respecting the environment); therefore, we do not know specific details about their immigration stories (e.g., whether or not they migrated through the Darién gap).

Positionality/reflexivity statement

Out of the 6 authors, 4 authors identify as bilingual Spanish-English Latina women, with Mexican, Nicaraguan, and Peruvian heritage. The first three are daughters of immigrants. Our personal connections and commitment to Latine immigrant family wellbeing and representation in research undoubtedly shaped our theoretical framework and data analysis process for the present study. We took a strengths-based approach to centering and amplifying the voices of the Venezuelan mothers and children in a way that highlights their community cultural wealth and authentic experiences.

The first two authors collaborated with the families and community partners in collecting the data for the larger project, and the last three authors were the principal investigators of the larger project. As a multicultural team of Latine and non-Latine white researchers, we met weekly and then biweekly after concluding data collection throughout the process of designing, collecting, and analyzing data. In these conversations, we worked together toward the goal of accurately and ethically representing participating families' experiences through research.

Coding

Oral stories and participant responses were transcribed in their original language and verified by trained, bilingual Spanish-English research assistants. Transcriptions were generated using ELAN software (Version 5.2; Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The Language Archive, Nijmegen, The Netherlands) in accordance with Codes for the Analysis of Human Language (CHAT) conventions (MacWhinney, 2014). To ensure linguistic and cultural nuance was accurately captured during analysis, all coding of videos with transcripts was conducted collaboratively by bilingual, bicultural Latina researchers who also selected and translated the selected quotes for this paper. When culturally specific expressions or idiomatic language resisted direct translation, the bilingual, bicultural research team discussed multiple renderings and selected the one that most faithfully preserved the speaker's intended meaning, noting interpretive decisions in the coding record.

We previously analyzed the full sample of oral stories with the larger project to understand how Latine families living in the U.S. made meaning through family storytelling about science, nature, and identity (Buhler-Wassmann et al., 2026; Bühler-Wassmann et al., 2026) and noticed a pattern of Venezuelan mothers sharing oral stories about their immigration journeys with their children. To answer our question about the ways that Venezuelan mothers were supporting their children in processing these immigration journeys, we engaged in qualitative analysis that blended deductive theoretical framing about stress and coping processes with inductive code development. To gain greater context for the families' experiences and familiarize ourselves with the data, the first three authors met to watch the immigration journey videos, read the transcripts, and memo about story content and structure, noting salient moments within the caregiver-child interactions including embodied reenactments. We also read transcripts from the mothers' first visit interviews and their post-storytelling responses explaining why they chose their story. Throughout repeated immersion in the narrative data and team discussions, we generated recurrent patterns that emerged from the data related to our research question on how stories support stress-coping processes. We identified six distinct coding categories reflecting adaptive coping strategies: (1) transparency about the dangers and stressors of their journeys, (2) cognitive reappraisal, (3) social connections and support during the journeys, (4) nature as a resource, (5) empowerment, and (6) spirituality and religion. Using the ATLAS.ti web version 26¹ to facilitate real-time team collaboration, we met virtually and co-coded the 7 stories together while documenting our decisions in our coding notes (Coulston et al., 2025). The primary unit of analysis was the single utterance (defined as a complete sentence or distinct conversational turn). To ensure distinct categorical boundaries, codes were applied mutually exclusively at the utterance level. We prioritized qualitative consensus and interpretive alignment. Any initial differences in interpretation were thoroughly discussed alongside the video context and transcript text until 100% consensus was reached across all coded utterances. This collaborative, consensus-building approach enhanced interpretive validity and ensured that code application and quote selections and translations faithfully reflected the nuances of the mothers' and children's storytelling dynamics.

Results

Mothers' story selection

The storytelling interactions varied in length. One story was 57 s, two stories were between 2 and 4 min, three stories were between 4 and 6 min, and one story was 17 min, 57 s.

Four mother-child dyads told autobiographical reminiscing stories, in which they shared with their children personal memory narratives of actual experiences crossing the Darién Gap. Three mother-child dyads told fictionalized stories based on their families' real-life experiences during their immigration journeys. In the fictionalized family stories, mothers and children regularly switched between third person (e.g., la mamá/the mother, la niña/the girl) and first person (e.g., nosotros/we, tú/you, or yo/I). We interpreted the switching between third person and first person as reflective of the similarities in the characters' and families' experiences. The choice to fictionalize their stories may be a coping strategy in itself. Mothers are likely creating a protective psychological buffer that enables children to identify with the characters and safely explore and find new meanings in what may have been a highly distressing experience.

When asked to share why they chose to tell this particular story in response to the prompt to share a science- or nature-related oral story, mothers made explicit connections between nature and their children's experiences migrating through the jungle.

Mother: And yes there was a little story…of the jungle yes and all that she, like for her to have an idea of the rivers, the animals, and all that she saw. (Y sí está el cuentecito…de la selva sí y todo lo que ella, como que tuviera como una idea de los ríos, de los animales, y todo eso que vio.)

All of them mentioned that it was an experience that they had lived with their children and some mothers highlighted the ups and downs of their children's emotional experience of the journey.

Mother: All that we experienced when we came, decided to leave our country. Because he was also surprised about all that we were encountering. There were moments when he was scared, there were moments he enjoyed, he was living like a journey. (De todo lo que vivimos en el entonces cuando venimos, decidimos salir de nuestro país. Porque él también se quedaba sorprendido por todo lo que pasabamos. Había momentos que se asustaba, había momentos que lo disfrutaba, pues estaba viviendo como una travesía)

Mothers elaborated that they told the story to support their children in understanding what they experienced. One mother, who shared a fictionalized story, mentioned specifically that she felt the need to help her child psychologically to protect him from the trauma of the experience.

Mother: It was an intense experience because it affected us emotionally. It affected us in many ways. That's why I told him the story. And because he lived it with me, too, in a more innocent way. One also finds oneself having to work with them psychologically, since it was a new experience and they were confronted with discomfort that they had never seen or experienced before, so that they don't end up too traumatized. (Fue una experiencia fuerte porque nos marcó emocionalmente. Nos marcó de muchas maneras. Por eso se la conté. Y porque la vivió conmigo también de una manera más inocente. Por lo que también uno allí le toca a uno trabajarles a ellos psicológicamente porque es algo que están viviendo nuevo, les toca la incomodidad que no han visto que no han vivido pues y para que ellos no se traumen tanto.)

In sharing these experiential accounts, mothers behave as critical pedagogues who instill messages of hope and identity while strategically reframing the emotional undertones of distressing moments.

As defined in Table 1, we identified a total of six adaptive coping strategies that mothers engaged in during storytelling as they processed their immigration journey experiences with and for their children. Specifically, the stories included (1) transparency about the dangers and stressors of their journeys, (2) cognitive reappraisal, (3) social connections and support during the journeys, (4) nature as a resource, (5) moments of empowerment, and in one family's story, (6) spirituality and religion as a potential coping strategy. Below is an in-depth description of our findings from the six coping strategies that emerged from the data.

Transparency about dangers and stressors

Fleeing the political and economic crisis in Venezuela, these families undertook the dangerous passage through the Darién Gap enroute to the U.S. In four of the stories, mothers were candid with their children about the distress and dangers that drove their family from Venezuela and confronted them through the journey, including walking for days, crossing rivers, encountering dangerous animals, and in Mexico, riding atop La Bestia (The Beast), also known as El Tren de la Muerte (The Train of Death), a network of freight trains running from southern Mexico to the U. S. border (Castillo, 2023). In age-appropriate terms, mothers explained reasons for and consequences of leaving their home countries, including the sociopolitical conditions that forced families to leave Venezuela and undertake the jungle crossing.

Mother: But at that moment—at that time—many bad things were happening in their country, weren't they? The circumstances. They were going through a very difficult time, right? Well, that mother decided to leave her country to travel through other countries... Then another situation arose where they had to go even further, and on that longer journey, they had to make their way through a jungle. (Pero en ese momento en ese tiempo en su país estaban pasando muchas cosas malas, ¿verdad? Las situaciones. Estaban pasando por un muy mal momento, ¿verdad? Bueno, esa mamá decidió irse de su país para recorrer otros países…Entonces pasó otra situación que tuvieron que irse más lejos y en esa más lejos les tocó pasar por una selva.)

In narrating the story this way, mothers communicate that external geopolitical conditions, not personal choice, rendered their families crisis migrants.

In a different autobiographical reminiscing story, a mother recounted her family's departure from Venezuela to Colombia, the birthplace of her youngest child with whom she was telling the story. When remaining in Colombia was no longer possible—the mother offered no explicit reason—they left the child's sisters and grandmother behind and began the journey north through the Darién. During the story, the mother asked her child about her feelings related to being far from her family. When the child said she felt fine, the mother responded, “¿Ya no te duele el corazón?” (“Your heart doesn't hurt anymore?”) and later told the research team her child had been very sad and may not grasp the vast physical distance separating her from her sisters and grandmother. Together, the mother's narrative and her reading of her child's emotional state illuminate how intersecting sociopolitical and immigration-related stressors reshape family structures, caregiving, and psychosocial wellbeing.

Families also referenced natural stressors that they encountered on the journey. In an autobiographical reminiscing story, a mother recalled a moment when her child heard growling that sounded like a lion or a tiger.

Mother: And the lion? You heard the sound it made, the lion or tiger? I don't know what animal that was, but it was (growling) big, right? (¿Y el león? ¿Tú lo escuchaste cómo hacía el león o el tigre.? Yo no sé qué animal era ese pero hacía todo (gruñendo) grande, ¿cierto?)

Similarly, in a fictionalized family story, the mother and child heard the sounds of scary animals, including a puma circling their camp. The child elaborated by describing their encounters with el lobo feroz (“Big Bad Wolf”), a fantastical connection to a storybook villain that the child drew to give shape to the dangers he had lived. The characters in the story also heard the cries of people who died on the journey and witnessed the traces left by thousands before them, including abandoned tents and blankets. Strong river currents threatened the characters' lives; the child and his mother retreated to higher ground among the trees, beyond the river's reach. In another fictionalized family story about a girl set on a mountain, a 4-year-old child co-constructed a narrative with her mother in which the girl feared crocodiles while crossing the river. This exchange illustrates how natural dangers exacerbated children's fears and how the stories framed crossings as something that had to be done regardless:

Child: The river is full of crocodiles. (El río está lleno de cocodrilo(s).)

Mother: Yes. (Sí.)

Child: And the river, (she) is scared to swim (with) the crocodiles. (Y el río, (ella) tiene miedo para bañarse (con) los cocodrilos.)

Mother: And the girl had to cross the river. (Y la niña tenía que cruzar el río.)

Across stories, mothers named dangers directly—predatory animals, treacherous terrain, fear itself—rather than shielding children from them. This narrative transparency may serve multiple functions, such as building children's awareness of what they survived, creating a space for emotional expression, and affirming that fear was a shared, reasonable response to real threat.

Cognitive reappraisal

Although mothers were transparent about the dangers, four of them also engaged in cognitive reappraisal in their stories, particularly in response to children's fear or distress. Rather than dwelling on the threat, mothers reframed the journey as manageable or even positive, and redirected stories toward safety and protection. By reframing the journey as an adventure rather than an ordeal, mothers could be buffering their children against stress-related consequences and fear. For example, in one fictionalized story, a mother cast her child as “el superhéroe morenito” (the Brown superhero), a strengths-based, culturally resonant reimagining of her own child. She encouraged her child to think of the journey as a camping trip whenever he felt scared, intentionally directing his attention instead toward swimming and bathing in the rivers. Though fictionalized, the story clearly draws on lived experience; the rivers are real, and the child's identification with the superhero his mother created is evidenced in how he joins and extends the narrative.

Mother: And the Brown superhero was scared, but whenever he was with his mom, his mom would tell him that he shouldn't be scared because it was a camping trip. Then they entered the jungle. We saw many rivers. (Y el superhéroe morenito tenía miedo pero siempre cuando estaba con su mamá, su mamá le decía que no tuviera miedo que era un viaje de campamento. Luego entraron en esa selva. Conocimos muchos ríos.)

Child: I bathed in them. (Que me bañe.)

Mother: The Brown superhero liked to bathe a lot in the river's waters. (Ese superhéroe morenito le gustaba bañarse mucho en el agua de los ríos.)

Mothers also responded to children's expressions of fear or danger by redirecting the narrative toward safety and resolution. When one child described a crocodile trying to eat the girl in a fictionalized story, the mother countered by retelling the scene. Rather than dismissing the child's contribution, the mother absorbed it and transformed its outcome in a subtle but significant act of narrative co-regulation.

Mother: And out of nowhere, what came out of nowhere? (Y de repente, ¿qué salió de repente?)

Child: The (Las)

Mother: A crocodile. (Un cocodrilo.)

Child: This is a crocodile, like this. (Este es un cocodrilo así.)

Mother: And it wanted to eat her. (Y se la quería comer.)

Child: Rawr rawr rawr. It ate her and told her. (Rawr rawr rawr. Se la comió y la dijo.)

Mother: No, no it didn't eat her. The girl fought with the crocodile. (No, no se la comió. La niña peleó con el cocodrilo.)

Child: Yes. (Sí.)

Mother: And the crocodile left scared. (whimpering) He went away scared like this. And the end. (Y el cocodrilo se fue asustado. (llorando) Así se fue asustado. Y fin.)

Across stories, mothers drew children into active co-participation in the storytelling while anchoring their shared memories in moments of pleasure and discovery rather than danger. In one, a mother physically recreated the journey, placing her child on her back and playfully reenacting walking through the jungle, spotting animals, and exploring the river. In another, a mother invited her child to remember the fish he saw while bathing in the river, drawing out a simple but warm exchange.

Mother: When you got in the river to bathe you saw many fishies. Did you see them? (Cuando te metías a bañarte en el río veías muchos pececitos. ¿Sí los veías?)

Child: Yes. (Sí.)

Mother: Yes, do you remember? (Sí, ¿te acuerdas?)

Child: Yes. (Sí.)

Mother: And you like it? (¿Y te gusta?)

Child: Yes. (Sí.)

A mother invited her daughter to reflect on the experience of the girl in the fictionalized story they shared, asking her if it was “muy divertida” (“very fun”). The mother was clearly surprised when her daughter said it was so fun that she wanted to go back. The mother's quick narrative closure (“Y fin”) after the unexpected response suggests she was navigating her child's emotional interpretation in real time, neither dismissing it nor elaborating on it.

Mother: And it was an experience that … (Y fue una experiencia que …)

Child: In Darien. (En Darién.)

Mother: Uh-huh, but how do you think the experience that the girl had was? Very fun? (Ajá pero ¿cómo piensa(s) tú que sea esa experiencia que pasó esa niña? ¿Muy divertida?)

Child: Yes. (Sí.)

Mother: Yes. (Sí.)

Child: Yes, very fun. I want to go over there. (Sí. muy divertida. Yo me quiero ir para allá.)

Mother: How is it that you want to go? The end. And she arrived here in Mexico and arrived in the U.S. (¿Cómo te vas a querer ir? Y fin. Y llegó aquí a México y llegó a los Estados Unidos.)

In one of the most striking moments in the data, a 5-year-old child independently engaged in positive reappraisal during the superhero narrative. The child added a scene in which the superhero sends El Tren de la Muerte (Train of Death) far away and replaces it with a train of corazoncitos (little hearts) to save those making the journey.

Child: But the Brown superhero was very curious and sent the train of death far away and put one of little hearts so that they could be saved. (Pero el superhéroe morenito tenía mucha curiosidad que mandó al tren de muerte lejano y puso uno de corazoncitos para que los salvara.)

In transforming an icon of danger and death into one of love and rescue, this child did more than reframe; he used narrative to enact care. That a 5-year-old reached for this reversal appears to reflect that cognitive reappraisal was not only modeled by the mothers in these storytelling contexts but in some cases internalized and extended by the children themselves.

Social connection and support

In four of the stories, caregiver-child and community relationships served as sources of connection and support that sustained adaptive coping in the context of stress. The caregiver-child relationship offered protection in its own right as a steady source of courage, safety, physical comfort, and mutual emotional sustenance. Notably, the support appears to move in both directions. For example, a child gave his mother the emotional support to keep going (“Le daba ánimo a su mamá para que siguieran adelante, ¿verdad?”), while the mother simultaneously strengthened her son. Within this relationship of mutual care, he found courage and shed his fear, not despite the danger, but because he had his mother's embrace.

Mother: And those nights the Brown superhero. (Esas noches el superhéroe morenito.)

Child: Wasn't scared. (No tenía miedo.)

Mother: He wasn't scared because he hugged his mommy. (No tenía miedo porque se abrazaba de su mami.)

Child: Yes! (¡Sí!)

Mother: And it gave him lots of courage. (Que le daba mucho, mucho valor.)

Child: Lots of courage. (Mucho valor.)

Mother: Lots of hugs, lots of love, and lots of care and affection. (Muchos abrazos, mucho amor, mucho cariño.)

The bidirectional nature of this emotional support suggests that familial relationships serve as a shared asset for generating hope and endurance during times of desperation and fear. By offering encouragement to one another, both the mother and child actively contribute to a collective repository of emotional strength and survival.

Caregivers also supported children's developmental needs throughout the journey. For example, caregivers carried their children on their backs so they could rest. One mother described holding her child as he rested as “recargando las baterías” (charging his batteries), a tender image of care and support. Another mother wove this into the story playfully, imagining her child as a little monkey clinging to his parents as they climbed the mountain:

Mother: While Mom climbed up the mountain, [the child] went like a monkey…He rode the whole way on his Mommy's and Daddy's backs and stayed asleep. (Mientras mamá subía la montaña, [el niño] iba como un monito…Iba todo el tiempo del camino montado atrás de mami y atrás de papi y se quedaba dormido.)

The interplay between physical care and playful storytelling demonstrates how caregivers transform a site of profound physical exhaustion into a site of coordinated familial support. Notably, this example illuminates the mother's improvisational capacity to translate a difficult migration experience into a developmentally appropriate narrative.

Social connection and support also came from community members encountered along the way. Stories included examples of strangers providing families with food, blankets, shoes, clothing, and places to bathe and rest. In a fictionalized family story, a mother and child were recounted receiving these provisions while riding the train for three and a half days:

Child: And they also gave us clothes, blanket. (Y también nos dieron ropa, cobija.)

Mother: Yes, they give a lot of food. (Sí le dan mucha comida.)

Child: Flip flop, they gave us some flip flops. (Chancleta, unas chancletas nos dieron.)

Another story described spending a night in a village where an Indigenous community offered food, bathing and rest before the family continued their journey.

Mother: We arrived at a place where there was a small population of indigenous people who helped them. They gave them food. They could bathe. They rested to be able to continue their journey the next day. (Llegamos a un sitio donde había una población pequeña de personas indígenas que los ayudaron a ellos. Les dieron comida. Se pudieron bañar. Descansaron para seguir su travesía el día siguiente.)

Child: The next day it was night and they camped in their tent. (Al día siguiente fue de noche y se encamparon en su carpa.)

Mother: And at night, we camped again in the tent to be able to rest. (Y de noche otra vez acampamos en la carpa nuevamente para descansar.)

In moments of acute danger, strangers became sources of physical safety. When a river swelled and the current began sweeping people away, community members held onto one another:

Mother: The river began to swell, and the current was sweeping people away! It was incredibly strong. Everyone was grabbing on—“Help each other! Hold tight to the ropes!” (¡Empezó una crecida del río y se estaba llevando a las personas al río! Fuerte la corriente. Y todos se agarraban. “¡Ayudense! ¡Sujétense fuerte las cuerdas!”)

At the border, a mother and son in a fictionalized family story encountered two strangers—reimagined as fellow “superheroes”—who helped them cross the wall safely.

Mother: And they walked until they found two men superheroes who helped them to cross the wall. (Y caminaron hasta que consiguieron dos señores superhéroes que los ayudaron a cruzar ese muro.)

Although immigrant families often lack established social networks and economic resources as they navigate countries with differing immigration policies and enforcement practices, these stories convey a counternarrative, one in which strangers become allies and mutual aid substitutes for institutional support. Community, in these accounts, is not a given but something built in motion, among people along the same perilous path.

Nature as a resource

In their stories, five mothers described nature as a resource for families' hygiene, relief from the heat, play, exploration, and navigation. Families relied on the rivers to bathe during the long journey, to cool off, and at times to orient their path (“se guiaban en el camino del rio”). These same rivers also posed serious danger, with threatening currents, feared crocodiles, and mysterious sounds. Mothers' narrative choices to foreground the river as a place of play and refreshment reflect the same reappraisal strategies described earlier, now extended to the natural world itself. Through these intentional narrative choices, mothers simultaneously acknowledge the risks of their migration journey while positioning the natural landscape as a repository of ecological knowledge and resourcefulness.

Children in the stories explored and played in nature, with rocks, leaves, animal feathers, and river water. One mother acted out her child's joy with her whole body:

Mother: (The boy) would dip his little feet in and go like this. Is that right? Mhmm, how fun! He would scoop up water just like that…He would grab the leaves that fell and he would grab the leaves…and the animal feathers. ((El niño) metía los piecitos y hacía así. Está bien? Mhmm que divertido! Agarraba agua así…Agarraba las hojas que se caían y agarraba las hojas… y las plumas de los animales.)

In recounting these moments of sensory delight alongside genuine danger, mothers offered their children an account of the journey in which the natural world was not only threatening but also wondrous.

Spirituality and religion

One mother drew on spirituality and religion to make meaning of both danger and wonder throughout the journey. Together prayer, divine presence, and mystery formed a framework for understanding experiences that exceeded ordinary explanation. When a puma appeared, the mother described the characters praying to God for protection, and the puma leaving.

Mother: He asked God to calm the puma down and make the puma leave. And [the puma] left. (Le pidió a Dios que tranquilizara a esa puma y se fuera. Y se fue.)

In this family's story the natural world was not only a source of danger but also divine meaning. When the child in the story asked “¿Por qué había tantas estrellas?” (“Why were there so many stars?”), the mother's answer wove together wonder and faith.

Mother: Because God was happy so it was for him to see the brightness of God's eyes reflected in the stars. (Porque Dios estaba alegre y eso era para que él viera que el brillo de los ojos de Dios se reflejaba en las estrellas.)

Alongside prayer and divine explanation, the story held space for the genuinely unknown, describing hearing women crying in the river but seeing no one there:

Mother: When the river grew, they heard voices. (Cuando crecía el río anteriormente, escuchaban voces.)

Child: Of wolves. (De lobos.)

Mother: Of women crying. And no one was there. Everything was a mystery. (De mujeres llorando. Y no había nadie. Todo era un misterio.)

Later, she described hearing sounds from the mountains that may have been trees falling or possibly walking. When the child objected that trees don't walk, the mother did not correct him toward the empirical but held open the mystery.

Mother: Then dawn broke, and we heard a very loud noise coming from the mountains. It was the trees—they were breaking loose, or possibly, they were walking. (Luego amaneció y escuchamos un ruido muy fuerte que venía desde las montañas. Eran los árboles que se estaban desprendiendo o posiblemente estaban caminando.)

Child: Trees don't walk. (Los árboles no caminan.)

Mother: They say there are stories about the trees walking, or that they were simply falling. Boom! It made a loud sound. (Ahí dicen que hay historias de que los árboles caminan o se estaban cayendo. ¡Boom! Sonó duro.)

Child: Boom! But what they didn't know is that they were walking. (¡Boom! Pero lo que no sabían es que estaban caminando.)

Through inviting her child into this mode of knowing the mother offered a spiritual and imaginative framework for experiences that defied easy explanation.

Empowerment

During the immigration journey stories, three mothers shared empowering messages about their children, themselves, and their communities. Mothers pointed out children's positive characteristics (e.g., feliz/alegre/happy, inteligente/intelligent, tenía muchas amistades/had many friends), and affirmed their racial and ethnic identities (e.g., “morenito es bien bonito”/”being Brown is beautiful”). In these ways, mothers capitalized on their cultural wealth and strategically reconstructed the emotional environment of the story by highlighting their children's strengths, which may support a positive self-concept as opposed to a fragile one.

Stories also centered families' resilience, persistence, and determination to survive. When one child named their poverty directly, the mother transformed the acknowledgment into a declaration of strength. The mother's emphasis on perseverance appears to underscore her intention of teaching her child to view their journey as a form of familial strength and cultural wealth rather than a marker of vulnerability. The child echoed it back, seeming to take in the reframe in real time. Indeed, the child's repetition of fuertes, fuertes, fuertes; luchando y luchando seems to show internalization happening in the telling itself, as the child carries forward the narrative of strength his mother offers.

Child: Yes but we couldn't, we didn't have money because we were poor. (Sí pero no pudimos, no tuvimos plata porque eramos pobres.)

Mother: They were poor but strong. (Ellos eran pobres pero fuertes.)

Child: Strong, strong, strong. (Fuertes, fuertes, fuertes.)

Mother: They were poor but strong and they kept fighting. (Eran pobres pero fuertes y siguieron luchando.)

Child: Fighting and fighting. (Luchando y luchando.)

Mother: For their lives and to save other people. (Por su vida y por salvar a otras personas.)

This exchange unfolded within the broader context of a dyadic mother-child migration, a journey undertaken with strangers, without the buffer of larger familial networks, intensifying the pair's reliance on one another. The mother also described her own courage in crossing the border despite knowing “enemigos” (enemies) awaited on the other side. Yet, rather than centering helplessness or deficits, she consistently reconstructed the narrative around strength and perseverance, and identity.

The stories ultimately declared that families succeeded. They crossed the jungle and arrived in the U.S. For one family, arrival meant reunion with the child's father, and the mother closed the story in the language of fairy tales:

Mother: So that they could reach their destination and reunite with their father. And when they finally met up with their father, the three of them: the mom, the son -the dark-skinned superhero- with their dad, they hugged tight, tight, tight. They cried, they shared their deep love for one another, and now they live happily ever after. The End. (Para poder llegar a su destino y encontrarse con su padre. Y cuando se encontraron con su padre, los tres, la mamá, el hijo, el superhéroe morenito, con su papá se abrazaron fuerte, fuerte, fuerte. Y lloraron y se quisieron mucho y ahora son felices para siempre. Fin.)

In choosing “happily ever after” to frame a real journey through poverty and danger, this mother recast their endurance into a shared family story of arrival, reunion, and belonging. This choice is consistent with the mother's intention to maintain hope and forward-looking possibilities, serving as an asset-based pedagogical tool for teaching her child about goal attainment and maintaining aspirations despite severe hardship. By deliberately ending the narrative on a positive note, the mother could be ensuring that the child's ultimate takeaway was anchored in safety and familial connection, effectively framing a stressful migration context into a temporary chapter of fear rather than a permanent state.

Discussion

This study shows family narratives are a powerful way to understand how families are coping with their migration experiences. Through narratives, mothers facilitated reflection on families' experiences and recounted and (re)interpreted difficult and potentially traumatic events for their children. Mothers used different narrative structures to either speak directly about the families' experiences through autobiographical reminiscing or fictionalize the stories in a way that created psychological distance between the families' and the characters' experiences. Like previous research with immigrant Latina mothers of adolescents (Alvarez-Frank et al., 2026), the Venezuelan mothers in this study appear to show a clear commitment to their preschool-aged children's wellbeing and safety and a focus on protecting their children from migration-related stress. Mothers likely empowered their children by focusing on family strengths, supportive relationships, and positive perspectives about the journey as well as their ultimate success in reaching the United States. Some mothers were transparent with information about journey-related dangers and stressors. This transparency was often followed by a redirection toward safety and protection, establishing physical and psychological safety. This vulnerability and support could be part of a strategy to build close, honest, and trusting relationships with their children, and help children make sense of difficult family experiences (Alvarez-Frank et al., 2026; Koenig Kellas and Trees, 2006). Ultimately, sharing these stories with their children could create opportunities for mothers to pass on and model adaptive coping strategies that may equip children with tools they need to thrive in the face of immigration-related adversity.

These stories highlight stressors that arise during families' immigration journeys, fear despite necessity, and the importance of individual, family, and community resources as mechanisms for resilience and positive adaptation. We argue that cultural stress theory should include migration journey-related stressors (e.g., sociopolitical, emotional, and natural stressors) and protective factors (e.g., storytelling, cognitive reframing, empowerment, and support from family, community, spirituality, and the natural world). Currently, cultural stress is understood as a multidimensional construct of post-migration stress stemming from acculturative stress, bicultural stress, discrimination, and negative context of reception in the host country (Meca and Schwartz, 2024). Salas-Wright et al. (2024) advanced that a crisis migrant-informed cultural stress theory should include pre-migration stressors as they also impact family functioning. Pre- and post-migration stressors like political instability, economic precarity, family separation, and restrictive immigration systems intersect to shape migration motivations and family decision-making among Venezuelan immigrant families. Additional stressors arise during migration that also impact immigrants' mental health (Galvez et al., 2025). Therefore, to better understand immigrant families' holistic experiences and provide appropriate, trauma-informed mental health treatments, cultural stress theory must include the immigration journey (Cruz et al., 2024; Meca and Schwartz, 2024).

Aligned with a community cultural wealth perspective (Yosso, 2005), the stories that Venezuelan mothers and children shared are rich in linguistic, aspirational, familial, social, navigational, and resistance capital. By inviting children to actively engage in storytelling interactions, mothers may support linguistic skills that equip children with the ability to process their emotions through stories. The stories demonstrate mothers' strong aspirations to provide a better quality of life for their children through empowering messages and positive cognitive reappraisal in response to the multiple barriers that they faced during their journeys. Social capital is present in the stories with the references to warm, high-quality caregiver-child bonds offering love, encouragement, and care, as well as communal coping through the provision of instrumental support and collective problem-solving. Notably, mothers' resistance capital is visible as they transform their unique lived experiences into a pedagogical resource, actively countering dominant narratives of what counts as valuable knowledge and skills for their children (Paulick et al., 2023). This involves reclaiming topics often deemed “inappropriate” or “dangerous” in traditional educational spaces, such as poverty, racism, mixed-status family dynamics, immigration, and language brokering, which constitute central realities of these children's lives (Fránquiz et al., 2021). Further, these oral stories could support positive ethnic/racial identity in children, which can help them navigate cultural stress and resist dehumanizing messages. In casting her child as the Brown superhero in the story, one mother affirmed their selfhood and pushed back against racialized exclusion and anti-immigrant marginalization, situating the journey not only as survival but as dignity. Empowering messages in storytelling about being Brown, beautiful, and strong may strengthen children's sense of self and protect them from consequences of racism- and discrimination-related stress (Curenton et al., 2022).

Given the larger study's focus on storytelling and science/nature, mother-child stories in the present study foreground the natural world, specifically experiences of walking in the jungle surrounded by trees, rivers, and wildlife. In these narratives, nature emerges as a paradoxical force: acting simultaneously as a lethal threat and a resource for families coping with adversity on the journey. While families navigated perilous terrains, they leveraged these same environments to promote their children's play and exploration in natural ecosystems, which are behaviors known to foster creativity, imagination, self-esteem, and cognitive development (Summers et al., 2019). When faced with dangerous animals and high-risk river currents, families relied on community support, courage, and spirituality. These strategies have been associated with emotional wellbeing in other contexts (Garcini et al., 2022; Gonzalez et al., 2022; Holle, 2025; Salas-Wright et al., 2021). The spiritual connection was inextricable with the landscape, for one of the mothers who credited God with creating nature and interpreted the brilliant stars as reflecting God's happiness. Although no quantitative measurements of children's developmental outcomes were included, these narratives underscore how the environment could serve as a conduit for stress-adapted resilience and cultural learning (Ellis et al., 2022; Marin et al., 2020). By identifying how families use natural resources to cope while experiencing adversity in natural environments, these findings extend research establishing links between exposure to nature and lower physiological and psychological stress (Shuda et al., 2020).

Several limitations of the present study warrant consideration. The sample is small and geographically specific, comprising seven Venezuelan families in two U.S. cities, which limits generalizability to other Venezuelan immigrant populations or other crisis migrant communities. The families included are also a self-selected subset—those who, when invited to share a science- or nature-related story, chose to recount their immigration journey; families who made different story choices are not represented here. The narratives were constructed retrospectively and within an activity framed around science and nature, which likely shaped which aspects of the journey mothers chose to foreground (e.g., physical environment, rivers, jungle terrain), potentially limiting the visibility of other stress and adaptive coping unrelated to the natural world. Future research should employ more open-ended prompts about family migration experiences with young children to provide a more expansive understanding of stress-coping processes. Story length varied considerably, from under 1 min to nearly 18 min, meaning shorter stories provided fewer opportunities for all coding categories to emerge, making direct comparisons across families limited. Finally, because variables such as trauma, emotional regulation, coping, and child wellbeing were not directly assessed, we present the psychological functions of storytelling as possibilities and areas for future research rather than as demonstrated outcomes. Empirical work would also benefit from utilizing asset-based frameworks to examine how transnational families' cultural wealth and lived experiences shape child learning and resilience.

Forced displacement from Venezuela, prolonged migration through Colombia, and families' subsequent journeys through the Darién jungle reflect how political instability, economic precarity, and restrictive immigration systems collectively structure migration trajectories for Venezuelan immigrant families and produce painful forms of transnational family separation, in which physical safety and family unity become competing necessities (Salas-Wright et al., 2025). Mothers' narratives reveal how they simultaneously navigate survival, caregiving, displacement, and their children's emotional distress within immigration systems. Importantly, children's responses suggest that children are not passive observers of migration-related adversity. Rather, they emotionally internalize the disruption of familial and transnational relationships and stress of migration, even when they may not fully articulate the depth of that loss. In these narratives, children's recollections of communal coping, both offering and receiving support, reveal an early immersion in collective resilience. By weaving fictionalized, fairy tale-like challenges such as battles with crocodiles, the Big Bad Wolf, and conquering the Train of Death and replacing it with a train of little hearts, children utilize their imagination to transform systemic violence into navigable, conquerable hurdles. With their mothers' scaffolding, these happy victories represent a form of psychological agency in a context where they otherwise have little control. Ultimately, attending to children's active engagement in storytelling uncovers their politicized funds of knowledge (Oliveira and Gallo, 2023), a sophisticated, often overlooked set of insights that positions children not merely as dependents of migration, but as active co-constructors of the family's survival narrative.

The journey stories represent the beginning of families' experiences as immigrants in the United States, as the consequences of immigration persist long after the migration journey itself has ended (Meca and Schwartz, 2024). Family separation, posttraumatic stress, acculturative stress, language barriers, and legal precarity function as chronic and ongoing stressors that cannot be fully understood without attention to sociopolitical contexts, family systems perspectives, and intersecting social identities (Cáceres-Titos et al., 2025). Venezuelan immigrants cope with these stressors in heterogeneous ways (Stonawski, 2025). The families in this study participated during a period of relative legal protection for Venezuelan immigrants, much of which has since been rescinded. Research consistently shows that instability and constant changes in immigration policies create conditions that exacerbate the dangers that children and families are being exposed to at a systemic level (Barajas-Gonzalez et al., 2021; Danaher et al., 2022; Wood, 2018). The families in this sample represent those who survived this journey; others did not, having lost their lives or loved ones in the crossing. Creating legal pathways, expanding access to asylum and refugee status, and increasing integration efforts could reduce these harms and better protect children (American Immigration Council, 2023; Yates and Pappier, 2023). Ultimately, while institutional protections remain insufficient, the mothers in this study actively reclaimed agency, using deliberate adaptive storytelling to protect and sustain their young children's wellbeing.