Trauma-Informed Housing and Wellbeing in Resettlement: An Actionable Design Model from Refugee Children’s Perspectives and Mothers’ Photovoice

• Refugee children linked housing and neighborhood conditions to trauma and stress. • Safety, stability, and privacy at home emerged as central to children’s well-being. • Play spaces, cultural belonging, and connection to nature shaped neighborhood needs. • Poor indoor quality, overcrowding, and inadequate infrastructure triggered distress. • A trauma-informed housing model is proposed, integrating home and neighborhood scales. Housing plays a central role in refugee integration. It shapes psychological well-being and everyday adaptation, yet we know relatively little about how refugee children themselves experience home and neighborhood environments as sources of safety or stress in resettlement. Refugee children often carry stress and trauma related to displacement, conflict, and ongoing instability, and these experiences can influence how they interpret safety, predictability, and belonging in daily spaces. Although trauma-informed design emphasizes the potential of everyday environments to reduce distress and support recovery, its application in refugee housing remains limited, and children’s perspectives are frequently absent. This qualitative participatory study engaged nine Zomi refugee children and nine mothers to be resettled within the last five years across three neighborhoods in Tulsa, Oklahoma, using a creative design workshop and storytelling with children alongside caregiver photovoice with mothers. Visual and narrative materials were examined through reflexive thematic analysis informed by trauma-informed care principles. The findings suggest that children associate well-being with secure, community-oriented homes and neighborhoods that support safety, cultural identity, play, and social connection, while housing insecurity, limited shared social spaces, and inadequate everyday amenities function as ongoing stressors that exacerbate trauma-related distress and recall earlier experiences of overcrowding, displacement, and instability. Taken together, these insights show how housing and neighborhood conditions can either intensify or help mitigate trauma-related stress for refugee children and point to practical design and planning considerations for creating inclusive environments that support refugee children’s well-being in resettlement.