General

‘The effect is catastrophic’: here’s what happens inside a child when they are taken from their parents

South China Morning Post, 19 June, 2018

’From a
strictly medical and scientific point of view … the harm our government is now
causing will take a lifetime to undo’
A
two-year-old Honduran asylum seeker cries as her mother is searched and
detained near the US-Mexico border on June 12, 2018 in McAllen, Texas. Photo:
Agence France-Presse
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, paediatrics 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.”
US Border
Patrol agents take Central American asylum seekers into custody on June 12 near
McAllen, Texas. Photo: Agence France-Presse

That
research on child-parent separation is driving paediatricians, 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.

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
Petition
by 7,700 US mental-health professionals and 142 organisations
The
American Academy of Paediatrics, 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 organisations have also signed a petition
urging US 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 birth rate
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.”
US Border
Patrol agents take Central American asylum seekers into custody on June 12 near
Mission, Texas. Photo: Agence France-Presse

As the
children grew older, Nelson and his colleagues began finding unsettling
differences in their brains.

Those
separated from their parents at a young age had much less white matter, which
is largely made up of fibres that transmit information throughout the brain, as
well as much less grey matter, which contains the brain-cell bodies that
process information and solve problems.
The
activity in the children’s brains was much lower than expected. “If you think of
the brain as a light bulb,” Nelson said, “it’s as though there was a dimmer
that had reduced them from a 100 watt bulb to 30 watts.”
The
children, who had been separated from their parents in their first two years of
life, scored significantly lower on IQ tests later in life. Their
fight-or-flight response system appeared permanently broken. Stressful
situations that would usually prompt physiological responses in other people –
increased heart rate, sweaty palms – would provoke nothing in the children.
What
alarmed the researchers most was the duration of the damage. Unlike other parts
of the body, most cells in the brain cannot renew or repair themselves.
The
reason child-parent separation has such devastating effects is because it
attacks one of the most fundamental and critical bonds in human biology.
Central
American asylum seekers wait as US Border Patrol agents take groups of them
into custody on June 12 near McAllen, Texas. Photo: Agence France-Presse
From the
time they are born, children emotionally attach to their carer and vice versa,
said Lisa Fortuna, medical director for child and adolescent psychiatry at
Boston Medical Centre. Skin-to-skin contact for newborns, for example, is
critical to their development, research shows. “Our bodies secrete hormones
like oxytocin on contact that reinforces the bond, to help us attach and
connect,” Fortuna said.
A child’s
sense of what safety means depends on that relationship. And without it, the
parts of the brain that deal with attachment and fear – the amygdala and
hippocampus – develop differently. The reason such children often develop PTSD
later in life is that those neurons start firing irregularly, Fortuna said.
“The part of their brain that sorts things into safe or dangerous does not work
like it’s supposed to. Things that are not threatening seem threatening,” she
said.
Research
on aboriginal children in Australia who were removed from their families also
showed long-lasting effects. They were nearly twice as likely to be arrested or
criminally charged as adults, 60 per cent more likely to have alcohol-abuse
problems and more than twice as likely to struggle with gambling.
In China
– where 1 in 5 children live in villages without their parents, who migrate for
work – studies have shown on those “left-behind” children have markedly higher
rates of anxiety and depression later in life.
Other
studies have shown separation leading to increased aggression, withdrawal and
cognitive difficulties.
“If you
take the moral, spiritual, even political aspect out of it, from a strictly
medical and scientific point of view, what we as a country are doing to these
children at the border is unconscionable,” said Luis Zayas, a psychiatry
professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “The harm our government is now
causing will take a lifetime to undo.”