There is debate happening in the U.S. regarding separating children from their parents. While we steer clear of politics on this blog, we do provide services in the area of child psychiatry, so we wanted to share an article we came across on the psychological impact on children who are separated from their parents. As a pediatrics professor at Harvard Medical School said, “The effect is catastrophic.”
From the Chicago Tribune:
This is what happens inside children when they are forcibly separated from their parents.
Their heart rate goes up. Their body releases a flood of stress hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline. Those stress hormones can start killing off dendrites — the little branches in brain cells that transmit messages. In time, the stress can start killing off neurons and — especially in young children — wreaking dramatic and long-term damage, both psychologically and to the physical structure of the brain.
“The effect is catastrophic,” said Charles Nelson, pediatrics professor at Harvard Medical School. “There’s so much research on this that if people paid attention at all to the science, they would never do this.”
That research on child-parent separation is driving pediatricians, psychologists and other health experts to vehemently oppose the Trump administration’s new border crossing policy, which has separated nearly 2,000 immigrant children from their parents in recent weeks.
The American Academy of Pediatrics, American College of Physicians and the American Psychiatric Association have all issued statements against it — representing more than 250,000 doctors in the United States. Nearly 7,700 mental-health professionals and 142 organizations have also signed a petition urging President Donald Trump to end the policy.
“To pretend that separated children do not grow up with the shrapnel of this traumatic experience embedded in their minds is to disregard everything we know about child development, the brain, and trauma,” the petition reads.
Nelson has studied the neurological damage from child-parent separation — work that he said has often reduced him to tears.
In 2000, the Romanian government invited Nelson and a team of researchers into its state orphanages to advise them on a humanitarian crisis that the country’s previous policies had created.
For decades, Romania’s communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu had banned birth control and abortions, and imposed a “celibacy tax” on families with fewer than five children. Ceausescu believed that ratcheting up the country’s birthrate would boost Romania’s economy. Instead, the government ended up opening massive state-run orphanages to deal with more than 100,000 children whose parents couldn’t afford to raise them.
At those orphanages, Nelson said, “we saw kids rocking uncontrollably and hitting themselves, hitting their heads against walls. It was heartbreaking. We had to make up a rule for ourselves as researchers that we would never cry in front of the children. Whenever one of us felt ourselves tearing up, we would walk out of the room.”
As the children grew older, Nelson and his colleagues began finding unsettling differences in their brains.
To continue reading this article on the Chicago Tribune, click here.