Refugee children settling in Australia often have parents suffering post-traumatic stress who are unable to meet their needs, a Melbourne forum has heard.
Brotherhood of St Laurence child and family resource centre manager Janet Williams-Smith said many refugee parents were widowed mothers grieving the loss of their partners, families, homes and way of life.
The impact of this on their children was profound.
"Children will look up at the face of their mother, for example, for validation and confirmation of their existence and reassurance about where they are and who they are, and often that face may be turned away, or distressed, or in a state of loss and bereavement or re-traumatisation," Ms Williams-Smith said.
"There are a lot of women that have come here and gone into a re-traumatised state and that has a massive impact on their young children."
Speaking at the In Their Own Right forum, Ms Williams-Smith said many of the children her centre works with have spent most, if not all, of their lives in transient and unsafe conditions coming through refugee camps.
"So aside from being persistently deprived of basic needs, such as food and shelter, safety, clean water, they have deeper issues of fractured attachments, lack of personal security and prolonged exposure to difficulty, violence and loss.
"And their parents are often in a permanent state of shock and fear ... many of the women that we've been working with present as if they're in a post-traumatic state, they're unable to meet the needs of their children, let alone navigate the systems that they need to do here to settle in Australia."
Ms Williams-Smith's centre works with 27 families, including 35 children aged nine months to eight years, most of who are refugees from Sub-Saharan Africa living in housing estates in Melbourne's inner-north suburbs of Fitzroy and Collingwood.
It runs programs including childcare, occasional and respite care, a breakfast club and homework program.
Ms Williams-Smith said the solutions needed for the children and their parents were not about parenting skills, but of dealing with settlement and trauma.
The Australian government invested less in children's early years than other countries, even though children's experience and development up to the age of three affected them their whole lives, she said.
Ms Williams-Smith said in a government review of settlement services last year, children were only mentioned twice and only then in the context of being in care while their parents studied English.
The Brotherhood of St Laurence is urging the federal government to include the settlement issue in its new social inclusion ministry, headed by Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard, and for state and federal governments to develop a settlement support model for young refugee children in their own right.
"Growing children is a very complex, private, personal and political thing ... and if you add to that cultural diversity and trauma, bereavement and isolation, we have a spectacular concoction that's often on the brink of exploding."