Fractured Childhoods: Psychosocial Trauma and Child Quality of Life in Mexico and the United States

This paper examines child well-being and quality of life from a comparative perspective between Mexico and the United States, challenging hegemonic approaches that reduce these constructs to individual and decontextualized indicators. Through a sociohistorical and critical analysis, it argues that in contexts marked by structural violence, historical inequality, political repression, and militarization, quality of life cannot be understood without attending to historical, structural, and psychosocial trauma shaping the material, relational, and symbolic conditions of everyday life.The paper contends that much of the research on child well-being, developed primarily in the Global North, has privileged normative metrics that overlook the social and political processes producing distress, thereby contributing to the epistemic silencing of children’s experiences. From a decolonial perspective, the study calls for moving beyond indicator-driven logics toward ethical, situated, and trauma-sensitive interpretive frameworks that recognize children’s and adolescents’ narratives as legitimate sources of knowledge.