Migr-Actions: recreational-expressive activities in a group of migrant children

The contribution we propose reflects upon some, often upsetting, aspects of migration from a specific perspective: children’s lived experience.

The traumatic aspect of migration and the consequences it can have for migrants are outlined according to a psychoanalytical perspective, where the concept of upsetting and displacement well describes how migration can become a dangerous factor for an individual’s feeling of identity and psychological and emotional stability, which very often involves an emotional regression.

Since children are more resilient to change, they live their mixing experience in a less defensive way. The adults’ ability to support children, from an emotional viewpoint, in the experience of change is crucial, since this experience has a much more complex impact on them than on adults, because they have to elaborate the migrating process together with all the transformations connected to their age and evolutionary phase.

The migrant children group’s experience, which is described in this work, allowed finding out some interpretations of the migration process which could be understood thank to the magnifying glass of group dynamics.