13: Children at the Border
In this special episode of Circle of Willis I talk with five developmental scientists about what may be happening to the children who are currently being separated from their parents as part of a policy to deter immigration and asylum seekers at the southern border to the United States. We discuss what happens to the private emotional lives of these children, but also what happens to their brains and to their bodies. Specifically, I spoke with
Jude Cassidy, Professor of Psychology and Distinguished Scholar-Teacher at the University of Maryland.
Megan Gunnar, Regents Professor and McKnight University Professor at the University of Minnesota Dylan Gee, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Yale University Charles Nelson, Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital Nim Tottenham, Associate Professor of Psychology at Columbia University Thanks also to VQR and the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia To Siva Vaidhyanathan, professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia and Executive Producer of Circle of Willis. To Nathan Moore, General Manager of WTJU FM, here in Charlottesville, VA and director of the TEEJ.FM network. To Tom Stauffer for original musical contributions to this episode, and for the music he made with Gene Ruley as part of their band the New Drakes. Finally, a special thanks to Lulu Miller, co-founder of the podcast Invisibilia and reporter for NPR News. ** Note: Mirian G's story, related in the show, can be found here.
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Jeff Sessions
What's happening is we're having more people coming, bringing children with them, entering between the ports of entry. Between the ports of entry illegally, and they're not, you cannot give them immunity. That's an offence. We believe every person that enters the country illegally, like that should be prosecuted, and you can't be given immunity and people who bring children with them recklessly and improperly and illegally, they should never do that.
Jim Coan
This is Attorney General Jeff Sessions explaining why he believes he has no choice but to separate children from their parents when those parents crossed the border into the US illegally. No law compels this practice, but Sessions believes it will discourage other parents from trying the same thing. If we can just get the word out.
Jeff Sessions
If people don't want to be separated from their children, they should not bring them with them. That's- we've got to get this message out. You're not given immunity, you have to, you will be prosecuted if you bring, if you come illegally, and if you bring children, you'll still be prosecuted.
Jim Coan
And here's White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, candidly explaining that he plans to separate children from their parents as a deterrent.
John Kelly
Yes, I am considering an audit to deter more movement along this terribly dangerous network. I am considering exactly that. They will be well cared for as we deal with their parents.
Jim Coan
In this special episode of Circle of Willis, I talked with five developmental scientists about what may be happening to these children. To their private emotional lives, to their brains, and to their bodies.
Megan Gunnar
Hello?
Jim Coan
Hi, Megan. It's Jim, calling back.
Megan Gunnar
Hey Jim, how are you?
Jim Coan
I'm doing well. How are you?
Megan Gunnar
I'm doing fine.
Jim Coan
This is Megan Gunnar, Regents professor and McKnight University professor at the University of Minnesota, where she directs the Institute of Child Development. Thanks for taking this call. I wanted to you know, as you as you know, I really wanted to chat with you a little bit about what might be going on for the children who we both know, have been sort of trapped in this policy that's been implemented of sort of separating kids from their parents and families at the border. Can you give me a little bit of what's going on? From your perspective?
Megan Gunnar
Yes, it's a horrifying policy. And it's designed, I think, to be horrifying, and horrendous. Because as they have said, they want parents to realize that if they bring their children across the border, they'll be separated. And they think that will serve as a deterrent to parents. Which - because parents understand that their children need them, that their children would be who are already being traumatized by the reasons that the family had to leave the country are very vulnerable. And this would be horrible for their children, as any of us, our parents would understand.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Megan Gunnar
That it would create terrible trauma for our own young children, our own infants. Two, three, four, five year old children to be forcibly taken by us, from us, and placed in a holding institution.
Jim Coan
Now there's-
Megan Gunnar
I can't imagine anything worse. So they are implementing this policy precisely, because parents will know that it will traumatize their children and therefore will decide not to come north of the border.
Charles Nelson
So we know that's probably 700 kids, but it could also be 1500 kids, and I've heard varying reports.
Jim Coan
This is Charles Nelson, Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, and Boston Children's Hospital.
Jim Coan
The
Charles Nelson
The second issue is when they're separated, where are these kids going? And one version is that they're going into foster care homes and other is that they may be going into something akin to institutions, residential care or group homes or something like that. But having looked into this a little bit, I can't quite figure out exactly where they're going. And whether the government actually is keeping track of where these kids are. I think the concern I have is the separation, the uncertainty, where the kids are going, how long they're going to be there, whether the parents know what's going on with their kids. And of course, whether the kids know where their parents are and how their parents are.
Jim Coan
Not long after learning about this policy - again, the policy of separating children from parents either crossing the border illegally, or seeking asylum here - I read about Marian G. I don't have her full name for you because she's currently part of a class action lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union. Marian had come to Brownsville, Texas, seeking asylum, and after spending a night together with her 18 month old son, her son was unceremoniously taken from her by immigration agents. They didn't explain why. Here's what Marian wrote about what happened that morning.
Jim Coan
The officers forced me to strap my son into a car seat. As I looked for the buckles, my hands shook, and my son started to cry. Without giving me even a moment to comfort him, the officer shut the door, I could see my son through the window, looking back at me, waiting for me to get into the car with him. But I wasn't allowed to. He was screaming as the car drove away.
Jim Coan
Folks, Circle of Willis is not a political podcast. At least, it isn't intended to be. On the other hand, one of my main goals is to allow scientists to be themselves as people, and people have political feelings. Still, there's a strong case to be made that political feelings can jeopardize the impartiality, and therefore the integrity and validity, of the scientific findings upon which we all depend. In a situation like this, what should we do? I guess the short and possibly glib answer is, be careful. Let there be no doubt that the people I talked to, for this special episode, have a point of view on the question of separating children from their families at the border. But let's not forget that they also have decades of combined scientific scholarship and experience. Do I think we need to understand the neuroscience and physiology of trauma to know that what is happening to these children is wrong? No, I don't. But I do think that science can add an important layer of depth to this conversation, as well as a perspective that might aid our understanding of just how damaging a policy like this can be. What follows mixed for grim, but I think, important listening. I hope you'll find it as useful as I have. Let's get back to Charles Nelson.
Charles Nelson
So there's a long history of studying kids separated from families. In some cases, you can think in the Second World War, there were kids in the United Kingdom, whose parents purposely had them come over and stay with families in the United States for you know, some portion or the duration of the war. But the context for those separations were very different. They, they had their families at home. Often they knew the people they were they were moving in within the United States, although not always. That's really different than wrenching kids away at the border from their families who possibly already made a very challenging trek to get to the border, say if the coming from other parts of Central America. So the commonly described sequelae would include, of course, on the psychological side, things like anxiety and depression, stress related disorders. Little kids could also manifest this in physical symptoms, you know, headaches and stomach aches, all the kids that all the symptoms, of course, that sometimes kids show when they're anxious, or when they're stressed. There could be changes in their ability to regulate their stress response. So this is mediated by something called the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis. So the kids could have elevations in cortisol or other stress hormones, and these things can have a toxic effect on the brain as well.
Jude Cassidy
Well, in terms of short term outcomes, I mean, it's just going to be really incredibly distressing, and scary and sad.
Jim Coan
Jude Cassidy, Professor of Psychology and distinguished scholar teacher at the University of Maryland, studies, social and emotional development, from infancy through adolescence in the context of family relationships.
Jude Cassidy
And they go into threat mode, you know, it's like when any of us are faced with like the most threatening- an earthquake or a hurricane or...
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Jude Cassidy
It's a really terrifying time. And so the capacities to devote any of your attention to burning in school or getting being cooperative, or the other kinds of things that we typically do when we're functioning well, is just going to all drop by the wayside.
Jim Coan
Megan Gunnar
Megan Gunnar
Traumatic experiences have profound effects on brain development and on the child's biology. These- they're doing this especially with these younger kids, they're doing it as time when our biology is working on setting our physiology up so that we can live in the kind of world we have to survive in. Okay? So if you are in extremely harsh conditions, and traumatizing conditions, your body is being prepared and your brain is being prepared to in a sense become an "act now think later" organism.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Megan Gunnar
So that if you see a... if you hear a gunshot, you don't say "gee, is that a gunshot?" You will be the kind of individual like "how did I get under this chair?" Oh, yeah. There was a noise.
Jim Coan
Right. Your brain is going to assume it's a gunshot. Yeah.
Megan Gunnar
Which might keep you alive under horrifying war-like conditions. But it's going to make it extremely difficult for you to function in an environment where you need to be reflective, where you need to care about a particular date in history and what it means. It's going to be hard for you to be doing well in school because your brain will be easily hijacked.
Jim Coan
Nim Tottenham, associate professor of psychology at Columbia University, where she directs the Developmental Affective Neuroscience laboratory.
Nim Tottenham
Well, at the level of the brain, we know that early caregiving trauma is associated with a hyperactivity and threat related systems of the brain that go on to produce risk for major depression and anxiety and a whole host of other mental illnesses. Substance abuse, PTSD, conduct problems, and so on.
Jim Coan
Charles Nelson.
Charles Nelson
One of the qualifiers we have to insert when we discuss what are the effects on the kids, would include how well the kids are, when they're separation, the context for that separation, and the extent to which families know where each other is. So if, the younger the child, when they're separated, and the longer they're separated, the greater the toll, the greater the long term toll on the kids. Of course, the other consideration is where the kids are. So it's one thing to separate the kids from their families, and put them with relatives that they know, but it's another entirely to separate them and put them with complete strangers.
Jim Coan
Jude Cassidy.
Jude Cassidy
And it's clear data also that emerged really early on. But the unfamiliar, just keeps adding layer and layer of stress. So to be in a, in an unfamiliar place, with no other people around that, you know, unfamiliar language, which is unfamiliar way of unfamiliar food, unfamiliar way of doing things. Each- we're designed to view the unfamiliar with wariness, and potentially threatening. So when there's nothing there that's, in this situation with taking these children right at the border, you're just throwing them into... you couldn't design an environment that's more unusual, and different and scary without any familiar grounding at all. We use the term secure base, you know, these children just don't have any secure base to hold on, to count on at all. I mean, one of the earliest discoveries, adult caregivers are not interchangeable. There is something very, something very specific about your mother or father. And you can't just replace them. And all these intense emotions, emotions are so intense because becoming attached and knowing that this person is the person who will watch out for me and protect me is so fundamental to our survival. Infants, and young children can't survive without adult caregivers. And so in order to make sure that we as a species, would really become attached and protest separation, it's just... that the whole system works in a very emotionally intense way so that we fight - as if it's a matter of life and death, because it is - to maintain those bonds.
Nim Tottenham
So when we think about the basic needs of a human, we often think about food, water, shelter, medical care. But when you're talking about a developing human, you have to also add in the caregiver. So if you remove the caregiver, the caregiver is a basic need for survival. And so if you remove that stability, then of course, you're placing an individual at incredible risk for a number of mental and physical health ailments later in life.
Charles Nelson
The care of these kids require, for example, ...trained social workers who were used to dealing with situations like this. I have no idea if they're involved at all. For all we know, these are immigration authorities who are simply taking these kids away, which would be, you know, potentially very, very traumatic for these kids. Having a trained in school social worker, or something like a social worker, like a psychologist that could reduce some of the trauma, but nevertheless, we still don't know. And what's baffling to me is why we don't know. I mean, is this a case where the government actually doesn't know? Or is it that they're being secretive about this, and they don't want anyone to know? And have they actually kept track of where the kids are? So those are, you know, a lot of considerations here.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Charles Nelson
I think it's, you know, really distressing is that I don't hear any announcements by the government, that this is a concern for them. In fact, wasn't it Kelly who sort of glibly or flippantly said, "well, we'll just put the kids in foster care or something like that."
Jim Coan
Or whatever? Yeah. He said.
Charles Nelson
Yeah, whatever. Exactly. So you don't want us to ask, "Are these kids being treated with the sort of the with the regard and the care that kids in the United States would be given?" And, you know, again, we don't know. I think it's the uncertainty that's almost, not quite, but almost as concerning as the possible fate of these kids.
Megan Gunnar
So I don't know exactly the conditions that they are putting these kids in. But I do know that we have been increasingly using what we call congregate care in the United States as a way of sort of a holding pattern for children that need need homes. And congregate care is basically an orphanage. I mean, it's basically.
Jim Coan
Yes, right.
Megan Gunnar
And so more than likely, what these poor, terrified and traumatized little kids are experiencing is being placed in group care in an orphanage-like institution, where they're being cared for by multiple people that change around the clock, and I wouldn't be surprised if most of them don't speak the kids language. I don't know that for sure, but it would be amazing to me if they managed to find a whole bunch of sensitive responsive caregivers who spoke Spanish.
Jim Coan
Nim Tottenham.
Jim Coan
So
Nim Tottenham
So often, when we think about kind of institutional caregiving, we focus on what are the basic needs of the child and are they being met. And the basic needs that we often focus on are food, water, medical care, shelter, and clothing. But what's lacking in institutional caregiving is any semblance of parental care. There is no way that institutional staff can provide caregiving for children because they're in charge of many, many children. The caregiver to child ratio is really poor, and the staff, our staff members, they're not parents. They're rotating shifts, they're going home, there's constant instability in the environment. And so this really is a far cry from what children get from living in a family environment. And so the consequences can be significant for children.
Jim Coan
Megan Gunnar.
Megan Gunnar
Now part of what is so disturbing to those of us who understand what's going on with the biology of kids, is that there are a lot of things that happen to young children that could drive all children in this direction, right?
Jim Coan
Right.
Megan Gunnar
We take them to the doctor, they get shots, they fall out their tricycle, a dog barks at them, you know, all these things. So we could have a whole list all children would be biased in this direction, except nature didn't want that to happen, either. That wasn't good for evolution. So we have in place the most powerful buffering, stress buffering system, nature knows that and that is contact with parents. So what we have discovered in my own research, is that as the attachment relationship develops, it's almost as if the parent becomes a part of the physical regulatory system of the child's body. So when that parent is available, when the child expects contact with that parent, and when you get older, even if you call your parent on the phone and talk to them, that kind of buffering system is in place and your body will not show that kind of activation. So we are taking we are taking away from these traumatized kids, the primary source of preventing what I just talked about. We should be deeply concerned about doing this right at the time when they desperately need those people in place.
Nim Tottenham
So I think one of the things that we've been most compelled by is the fact that as a species, we stay in this childhood phase for a really long time. And that has to be taken into consideration when thinking about the role of the parent. So in other words, we evolved as a species with the expectation that this caregiver is going to be around for a long time to scaffold our central nervous system development. And so when we look at what is the parent doing, we often focus on the discrete behaviors that parents are doing, and those are certainly important, but there's much larger influence of the parent, which is they're the ultimate regulator of the child. They're regulating food intake, they're regulating temperature, they're regulating emotions, they're regulating attention, cognition, and so on. So you can think about this parent child relationship as a single organism.
Jim Coan
Wow.
Jim Coan
I mean that what you're really saying is that the parent is is essentially part of the child's body.
Nim Tottenham
Yeah, exactly. And depending on how young you go, the infant will literally die if they don't have caregiving. At older ages, children can technically survive, but they're certainly not receiving the species expected input of the parent.
Dylan G
Really a lot of this insight comes from our understanding of disruptions and stable caregiving.
Jim Coan
Dylan G, assistant professor of psychology at Yale University, where she specializes in the neural development of children.
Dylan G
So studying environments such as caregiver deprivation, where there's this really severe disruption and kind of a species expected input of stable caregiving. So we know that, that having a stable caregiver early in life is really an essential component to healthy human development, and really even survival. Parents provide essential input in terms of factors such as learning, and emotion, and language, and social interaction, and that kind of early infant caregiver bond is extremely powerful in terms of attachment, and really setting the stage for healthy cognitive and emotional development in navigating the social world.
Jim Coan
Megan Gunnar.
Megan Gunnar
And of course, once children have formed attachments to single, you know, their parents, or whoever it is their caregiver, those aren't transferred... readily. It's not like any nice person will do.
Jim Coan
Right.
Megan Gunnar
No, no, no, no, any parent knows that their kid maybe their babysitter reads books better than they do, but at night, I want you to read me the story, even though you're crummy at reading stories-
Jim Coan
That's right.
Megan Gunnar
-because I'm attached to you! Not just attached any old adult.
Jim Coan
Jude Cassidy.
Jude Cassidy
If her baby, for 12 months old, or, you know, a three, four or five year... increasing, you know, all the way through the preschool years, their entire world is their parents... their parents.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Jude Cassidy
You know, they don't know about political situation, or the new target that opened down the block, or there's nothing else, there's just this, just the arms of their parents. You know, just such a huge part of their life and their feelings of safety and security and their world to lose that. It's the entire world that just disappeared, and it's just really terrifying.
Jim Coan
Nim Tottenham.
Nim Tottenham
When we think about kids being forcibly separated by their parents, our immediate empathic reaction is "that's really sad." But the sadness is not the thing that really matters here. What matters is this is a trauma to the developing nervous system. And we don't think of it often as a trauma because the scars are invisible by the naked eye. But we can see them in brain development. And it's that lasting impact of that early trauma that ends up producing a lot of the mental health problems that adults suffer from.
Jim Coan
Dylan G.
Dylan G
A stable caregiver is critical to helping emotion regulation at the level of front to amygdala circuitry-
Jim Coan
Front to amygdala circuitry? What do you what do you mean by that exactly?
Nim Tottenham
It's not the same as two separate people. It's a single organism and actually dating back to the analyst Winnicott, he famously said, "There is no such thing as an infant," meaning that you can't think about a child without thinking about them with the parent. The parent is essentially a biological extension of the child up until the point when they're independent as adults, but that in most humans takes at least one to two decades.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Dylan G
So here, we're really thinking about the amygdala and its dense reciprocal connections with a distributed network, including the prefrontal cortex. So the amygdala is really critical for governing, learning about biologically relevant stimuli in the environment. This could be something that promotes threat, but it could also be just something that you know, has a positive valence, but it's important for survival.
Dylan G
And amygdala reactivity in the context of stress or threat could become excessive. And so the prefrontal cortex and other cortical regions play an important role in down regulating the amygdala. And what we know from our work and that of others is that these connections undergo protracted development so well into adolescence and young adulthood these connections are still maturing. And so during childhood, parents play a really important role in instantiating, that connectivity and providing that buffering against amygdala reactivity.
Jim Coan
So the parents are on the one hand directly buffering the effect of stress by changing how the amygdala reacts to potentially threatening stimuli. But on the other hand, it sounds like they're, they're sort of training up the kids ability to regulate them themselves.
Dylan G
Yeah, exactly. That's very consistent with how we've been thinking about it in the sense that this may be a time of kind of beginning to shape that. So instantiating the connections, almost giving the system the practice of having that connectivity and regulation early in life, and then eventually allowing that to strip- to switch to a more intrinsic form of regulation, so that adolescents and young adults are more independent.
Jim Coan
Jude Cassidy.
Jude Cassidy
You know, adult, humans have the capacities for it to make mental representations, ideas, schemas, thought processes, about how the world works, and-
Jim Coan
What like expectations for what the world is going to deliver.
Jude Cassidy
Yeah, and when chilled, and we base these expectations and beliefs on on our experiences. And so when there we are, that... this policy is essentially creating a set of experiences where the world is threatening, where the unknown can happen. When the unknown dangerous can happen, where people aren't there to be able to be counted on. And those kinds of representations are really problematic in the long run. Because you can, it's, we just think of it sometimes as children developing a threat mindset, where there's just a lot of threat in the world, and the world is scary people aren't to be counted on, things can happen really fast. And when you have a mindset like that, a threat mindset, that's gonna guide so much about your functioning. It's gonna guide, it's going to be hard to pay attention to things in school and be he- focused because you're going to be scanned, instead of paying attention to what the teacher is trying to get you to pay attention to. You're going to be scanning the environment looking for threats. You're going to- if you see something another child has, you might be more likely to go and grab it because you don't have expectations that there are trusted adults in the world who are going to watch out for you and make sure you get your fair share. It's going to affect how you can regulate your emotions because when there's a lot of threat around you, you get sort of much more of a hair trigger mechanism for responding, emotionally.
Jim Coan
Megan Gunnar.
Megan Gunnar
Your brain actually becomes very highly vigilant to threat and hyper reactive. So your body's been sort of a chronic threat mode, your physiology gets shifted in terms of your immune system, so that you will rethink. Now this we still need a little more evidence in humans for, but in animal models, this is what you see. Your your body shifts, so your immune system becomes set to chronic inflammation as if you always had a mild infection. Okay? And what this does, is it probably allows, if you start, if you get a wound and you start bleeding, it may actually ramp up your capacity to stifle that wound. But it sets you up for all sorts of other illnesses potentially coming down the line.
Jim Coan
Dylan G.
Speaker 1
it's
Dylan G
It's really thought that in the absence of the stable caregiving that what's happening is that the organism is really adapting. So, you know, as a species, we're very good at adapting to our environment in some ways. And so the disruptions that I'll talk about, you know, they may be promoting survival in the short term, but it's been shown that they do have these really severe long term consequences. So one example that we see in, in studies of caregiver deprivation, where we're studying children who were reared in international orphanages and deprived of this stable caregiving very early in life, and then are adopted into stable families. And so we can really study the impact of that early period. When we look at the level of this amygdala prefrontal circuitry, what we see is actually an accelerated development. It seems that those children who had early parental deprivation are showing an earlier onset of this more mature prefrontal amygdala connectivity that usually we wouldn't see until adolescence or adulthood. We see this in kids as young as six.
Jim Coan
So they're developing too early, in a way.
Dylan G
Exactly. Yeah. And it's really striking to see because, you know, in some ways, we might think that that's associated with better emotion regulation, but to see that in such an age, atypical fashion, could be very concerning and have long term consequences.
Jim Coan
Jude Cassady.
Dylan G
In the longer term, I mean, after a certain point, we know from the classic studies that babies and young children- children of all ages- that they just start to shut down and you know, they get big, you can only cry hysterically and allow yourself to feel those really scary emotions for so long. And then you just kind of go just shut down. So on the surface, they look like they've gotten used to it, but we know from measures of physiology and from their later behavior, thier sleep disturbances, eating disturbances that, you know, it's not like they're fine.
Dylan G
Charles Nelson.
Charles Nelson
So in work that we and others have done when kids are separated early in life from their caregivers for the long term, you see, on the behavioral level, you see a very increased rate of psychopathology like anxiety, ADHD, and things like that. So in work that Charles Zeanah, and Nathan Fox, and I have done in Romania, we see that roughly 20% of kids who experience deprivation, wind up with a diagnosis of ADHD. Large numbers might wind up with also mood regulation problems like anxiety and depression. In the brain, we see a reduction in gray matter and white matter. So this sort of the gray matter would be this sort of computation is done by neurons. And the white matter would be the information superhighway that transmits information through the brain. Both of those are reduced. We see reductions in the connectivity of the brain, we see on the biological side, that there's a cap of our chromosomes is called the telomere region. And it protects our chromosomes from the repeated cell divisions that undergo, that we undergo for the lifespan. And we see an accelerated telomere erosion, which is probably associated with worse health outcomes as well. And then we see reductions in what we call executive functions, the ability to engage in higher cognitive functions, we see a diminishment in IQ, reduced language performance. And these are some of the things many of the outcomes depend on both how old the child was when the separation occurred, and how long the separation occurs, you know, how the duration of the separation.
Jim Coan
So, psychological trauma is mediating a pathway to brain trauma and that is affecting behavior down the road, which can affect health, longevity.
Charles Nelson
Yeah, you got it. Yeah. Then there's the "what happens to the parents?" I mean-
Jim Coan
Oh my God.
Jim Coan
Jude Cassidy.
Charles Nelson
-this has to be excruciatingly difficult for the parents that have lost their kids, because for the majority of parents their instinct is to take care of their kids. And now they're in a position where that's not going to happen. And they may not be getting any information about how long it'll be before they see their kids again. So there's the psychological harm done to the, or the potential for psychological harm done to the families.
Jude Cassidy
I think another way to think about this also is that we know that parents who had babies who almost died when they were in the first few years of life. Even when the babies recover, those parents then start to parent differently.
Jim Coan
How so?
Jude Cassidy
You know, healthy, the best parenting comes from a feeling of security that you're okay yourself. And the JIRA calm, competent adult who can handle temper tantrums, or can handle the difficulties of life, and you can stay as informed, serve as a, as a calmly confident, responsive, secure base for your child. And when your own... the extent to which you face threat and trauma in your own life, then, it's gonna make it harder to do. Yeah, a calm, ready, secure base.
Jim Coan
So you're really what you're saying is, at the point that they've been separated forcibly from each other, the best case scenario is that some at some point, hopefully, relatively soon, they're reunited. But even in the best case scenario, it's possible that something could fundamentally change, about their relationship as a function of this experience.
Jude Cassidy
It's true.
Jim Coan
Charles Nelson.
Jim Coan
You know, when we when you think of what could be happening to these kids, I think the attitude that I see in people like John Kelly, Jeff Sessions, and you know, just people that I know, who are less disposed to be horrified by by this policy, is that there's no, at the very least, there's no violence happening. Right? But I think it strikes me that the violence is, is happening, it's just more hidden, it's not as obvious.
Charles Nelson
Well, so I think a mistake many people think in when it comes to maltreatment, is that abuse, like physical violence, is worse for kids than neglect. But the reality is that if you look at the Child Protection figures first, neglect is by far the most common form of child maltreatment in the United States. Probably 80% of the kids who are reported to the authorities for maltreatment experienced neglect. And second, we know particularly early in life, that neglect is much more insidious on long term changes in brain and behavior than, say, physical abuse or emotional abuse or something like that would be. Now that of course, it's not to say that abuse, overt harm to the child is not terrible for kids. It's just that neglect is even worse for kids. And the reason is simply that the brain is sort of trying to put itself together and it depends on experience. And it's not getting in a sense the instructions it needs in order to put itself together to assemble itself. And so that's one of the reasons why neglect is so bad early, particularly early in life. Because think of trying to, you know, instruct a computer to do certain things with a, with no input at all. So that's why neglect is so bad. And as a result, you know, we observe a whole range of neurobiological and behavioral outcomes in kids who experienced neglect. So in the case of these kids, we know they're deprived of seeing their parents. We don't know is how deprived the environment that they're now placed in is.
Nim Tottenham
Now while there's tremendous heterogeneity and outcome, some children show incredible resilience. Nonetheless, this is a major risk factor for stress reactive systems for emotion regulation systems. And so children are a great place to, at great risk for poor mental health outcomes.
Jim Coan
Not exactly going to a situation that's that's going to help them recover from what in all likelihood are multiple traumas going to ever they're fleeing the process of of traveling to the border, and then being separated from there.
Nim Tottenham
It's adding insult to injury, you know, families are fleeing for a reason. They're not leaving their homes because they're in a good situation. And then they've endured a lot to travel to the US. And then as soon as they get here, the children are further traumatized. So if anything, these are children who need remediation, they need ameliorative experiences when they get here, and removal from the parent is exactly the worst thing that could ever happen to them.
Speaker 2
So
Megan Gunnar
So it's like a triple whammy. The families had to flee because things are terribly traumatic where they are, they get to the- that trip must have been horrendous. They get to the border, and we yank the kids away. And we don't give them a parent- an alternative parents to take care of them, stick them in probably congregate care for a period of time. And that period may be fairly long, because where are we going to find all these foster parents?
Jude Cassidy
I mean, I know you don't need me to say this, but I just, you know, the whole idea of... I heard some NPR the other day from some federal agents just being adamant that these parents are breaking the law. And so there was to be no pity. But the idea that we as a country would punish children in such a really traumatic way for something for their parents behavior. I mean that, that's that's a choice we make and that that's even part of our moral compass, that it's possible that we would that we would do, that we would stoop to that level of punishing these children in such bad ways. It's just beyond... makes me speechless. Yeah, the only way we can protect our borders is to punish these children.
Megan Gunnar
Who are we as a country
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Megan Gunnar
That we could even begin to think that there was a shred of morality in this this this policy. We should be all very, very ashamed.
Jim Coan
Thank you to Megan Gunnar, regents professor and McKnight University professor at the University of Minnesota, Charles Nelson, Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children's Hospital, Jude Cassidy, Professor of Psychology and distinguished scholar teacher at the University of Maryland, Nim Tottenham, associate professor of psychology at Columbia University, and Dylan G, assistant professor of psychology at Yale University. Thanks also to VQR in the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia to Siva Vaidhyanathan, professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia and executive producer of Circle of Willis. To Nathan Moore, General Manager at WTJU.FM. here in Charlottesville, Virginia, and director of the TeejFM network. To Tom Stoffer for original musical contributions to this episode and for the music he made with Gene Ruliey as part of their band, The New Drakes. Finally, special thanks to Lulu Miller, co-founder of the podcast InvisibIia, and reporter for NPR News. Bye bye.