Media in many instances, in the US, has a way of capturing news that grabs the attention of its viewers. The headlines must immediately grab you or the news story may not be worth watching, for some. In the 21st century, the issues revolving around the border between Mexico and the US has been a difficult topic to discuss. Depending on many variables, your view on what the US should do at the border leads to certain conclusions. In the middle of this political storm, many humans are left without a voice and little protection for their well-being. I want to highlight a feature of the border issue in this blog. This feature has to do with the children of families that cross the Mexico-US border. What is their experience going through such a tumultuous experience like crossing this border? Who can imagine being a young boy or girl, not given an option to stay or go, and to have to risk their life to reach a destination in another country that is unknown to them? What type of trauma do children experience going through an event like this?

Jones-Mason and her colleagues (2021) focus on the attachment trauma that occurs for many children who cross the US-Mexico Border (USB) and are separated from their families. In 2018, the Attorney General of the US issued a memorandum declaring a “zero tolerance policy” under which all adults crossing the USB can be criminally prosecuted. Additionally, if these adults travel with their children, children can forcibly be separated from their caregivers. According to Jones-Mason et al., many instances occurred where parents who posed no danger to their children were also separated from each other. The ACLU reports that the government has acknowledged separating 1,556 children from July 1st, 2017, to June 26th, 2018; 207 of these children are under the age of five, five under one year of age, 26 a year of age, 40 two years of age, 76 three years of age and 60 four years of age. Tally of children split at borders tops 5,400 in a recent count.[1] The most current figures as of July 2019 indicates approximately 13, 200 unaccompanied children (children who arrive to the USB without a parent or caregiver) were being housed in more than 100 federal shelters around the country with some commentators expressing concern that stringent sponsor reunification requirements were delaying the release of the children. Children, at this young of an age, suffer a great deal in their attachment and brain development. The affects last a lifetime.

Deprivation (not having a safe caregiver nearby for a long period of time) and separation from parents/caregivers permanently damage the mental health of adolescents. Cognitive and biological development are severely impaired when children are separated from their families at an early age. From a different lens, the right hemisphere develops with many challenges. The child with right brain deficits, Professor Alan Schore tells us, creates difficulty for a child to identify emotional cues when she is under distress. This can lead to a child not being able to be soothed by a caregiver in the future because they have a difficulty identifying how and why they feel what they do.[2] John Bowlby-the Father of Attachment Theory-explains that deprivation can lead to issues with sleep, concentration, peers, tempter tantrums, and clinging behaviors.[3] When a child is separated from their family, the child(ren) may not understand the purpose of being removed. Bowlby suggests that a child may experience this separation as not feeling “wanted” by their caregivers. [4] Anxiety and depression have been seen in children who experience caregiver deprivation. We can all agree that children should not have to experience such traumatic events like this.

Biologically speaking, a child cannot control their emotions without the help of their caregiver. Bowlby outlines three main stages that a child experiences when they are separated from their caregiver: protest, despair, and eventually detachment.[5] Protest is often motivated by stranger anxiety, despair by grief and mourning over the loss of her attachment figure, and detachment serves as a defense measure due to being vulnerable because of a lack of an attachment figure. If a child feels like their attachment figure is emotionally available for her, the child is less likely to experience intense feelings stemming from chronic fear. However, a child that has not experience trauma due to their attachment issues will adapt a flexible emotional strategy in which she may communicate to parents directly and freely. This strategy is useful when a child needs to communicate her distress to a parent/caregiver. A child, to no fault of her own, may feel a feeling of rejection if the parent(s) is separated from her. As a result, this child may develop an avoidant attachment style that minimizes the importance of attachment relationship with her caregiver and ignore intense emotions.[6] The US can be a safe place to live in and many children suffer at the same time. Many children as we see never have the chance to trust another human to keep them safe and healthy.

Human and animal studies show that many regulatory processes are expected to develop within the context of the attachment relationship including the autonomic nervous system, the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) stress response, and epigenetic and cellular response.[7] During a stress response, normal systems like these do not develop properly (I write about how stress impacts these systems in other blogs). If the stress response is left unchecked, long-term stress produces long-term damage. Parents/caregivers help a child learn how to “shut off” the stress response. Parent’s developed nervous system creates a “buffer” for the child to slowly decrease intense emotions caused by stress in a child. Thus, separating a parent from her child deprives a child of the physiological regulators that is created within the parent-child relationship. A child does not know that she needs her parents to this extent; she is left to defend herself without having the biological skills to do so yet when separated from her caregiver. In other words, a child needs her parent to survive beyond meeting her physical needs.

Early deprivation may lead to alterations to brain circuitry that supports emotional regulation.[8]As I mentioned earlier, many children who are separated at the USB are put into federal house shelters. This may contribute to children who are reared while deprived of basic early experiences that drive typical brain development. These adverse experiences, i.e., trauma, occur at a critical point in brain development and interfere with normal neurodevelopmental maturation in key areas of the brain.[9] Findings from animal work demonstrates that early adverse experiences like deprivation are associated with alterations in synaptogenesis, neuronal differentiation, and synaptic pruning, reward response and motivation. Findings from human neuroimaging studies show long-term alterations in neural pathways that support higher level emotional functioning in children. For example, children exposed to early-life neglect show negative changes to their limbic and fronto-striatal brain areas.[10] Lastly, developmental differences have been shown in myelination (healthy neurons in the brain) patterns and neural connectivity in pathways that support emotional regulation that may also make if difficult for children to control their emotions. Children need to protect whether they are natives of the US or not. Injustice is a concept that must be identified in a society that desires to maintain its existence.

To wrap up, a parent and her child have already experienced physiological, emotional, and psychological consequences due to earlier traumatic exposure. Families are fleeing to the border due to violent, war, poverty, or some other source of trauma that motivates a family to make a dangerous journey to the US. In fact, reports confirm that trauma from before and upon entering the US is common among children entering federal care facilities. Traumatic events like being kidnapped, rape and physical abuse. I recently had a discussion with a colleague who is also a clinician. She works at a counseling agency in Chicago, and she works with families who are seeking asylum who left their home country due to violence they experienced. My colleague shared with me that she recently started to work with a family whose daughter was almost raped by a person in their neighborhood in Mexico. My colleague shared her experience having to listen to this 8-year-old retell the story of what happened the night she was almost raped. The USB discussion is difficult to have, I know. I urge you all, however, to set aside your differences when it comes to the USB debate for a moment so that we can make space to listen to the stories of those who suffer greatly around us. We can agree, at least, that children do not deserve to live with these traumatic experiences their whole life.

[1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/ tally-of-children-split-at-border-tops-5400-in-new-count.

[2] Schore, A. N. (2003). Affect dysregulation & disorders of the self: Vol. 1. (Affect dysregulation & disorders of the self.) New York [etc.: Norton.

[3] Jones-Mason et al., 2021.

[4] Ibid

[5] Bowlby, J. (1973). Separation: Anxiety and anger. New York: Basic Books.

[6] Jones-Mason et al., 2021

[7] Beach et al., (2016). Exploring genetic moderators and epigenetic mediators of contextual and family effects: From Gene Environment to epigenetics. Development and Psychopathology, 28, 4, 1333-1346.

[8] Bick et al., (2017). Early deprivation, atypical brain development, and internalizing symptoms in late childhood. Neuroscience, 342, 140-153.

[9] Ibid

[10] Behen et al., (2009). Abnormal Fronto-striatal Connectivity in Children with Histories of Early Deprivation: A Diffusion Tensor Imaging Study. Brain Imaging and Behavior, 3, 3, 292-297.