The wound of a child’s separation from their parents is something that is never forgotten, huge, and leaves a series of aftermath that remains in time almost irreparably, is the experience of many children who were suddenly (and violently) separated from their parents on the U. S. -Mexico border.
There are images that record the most inhuman essence of our race. In mid-June last year, newspapers around the world published photographs and videos of the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas. There and along the border was erected a set of buildings in which dozens of children cried and asked their families while they were curled up in metal cells.
- Recognizing the impact of long-term separation between parents and children requires us to implement measures to ensure that families do not separate under any conditions or circumstances.
These were the children of immigrants who had just entered the country illegally, they were children who had just gone through a very traumatic time: being violently separated from their parents, it is known that the U. S. government has separated more than two thousand children from their parents. parents, following Donald Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy.
While it is true that the president himself reversed this policy of separation by social pressures, professionals who are experts in child psychology claim that the damage is already done and that the injuries that may have caused this suffering will in many cases be irreparable.
The image in the article is the one that has gone around the world for the expressiveness, anguish and confusion that encloses the face of a boy, a two-year-old Honduran girl has just been arrested with her mother at the border. I knew that, in this case, mother and daughter were not separated; however, she does not ignore this moment of anguish, threat of authority and heightened and deep fear that she certainly sees in the expression of her own mother.
Psychologists have been studying the effects of trauma on a child’s mind for decades and it is known that nothing can affect both physical, neurological and emotional development and trauma caused by a separation, temporary or lasting deprivation, of parental attachment. Two thousand children separated from their families have been separated from their mothers, fathers or uncles in the worst way: through violence.
This further intensifies the impact of trauma. We know that after the separations, the children go through three phases: protest, despair and, subsequently, detachment, in all these cases it does not matter if they were well fed or had their physical needs met. their parents and the absence of the family figure who gives them affection, safety and attention leads them to a state of absolute helplessness.
The wound of separation comes from an undisputed source: anguish, human beings are programmed to respond in this way, that is, when we are separated from our family and that is basically our main social core, we experience a combination of stress, fear and uncertainty.
All these emotions define emotional distress, regardless of, for example, whether they are bad parents; the simple experience of being separated from them puts them in a state of total despair.
Gradually, this situation of sustained anxiety changes the child’s physiology, stress and hormones, such as cortisol, begin to wreak havoc in a still immature organism, in a brain that is still growing, in a mind where, gradually, trauma will begin to manifest. Grab.
No child should live the traumatic separation of their parents, today and because of the continuous migratory phenomena that occur in the world, a key priority must be established: the family group, we cannot forget, for example, all the previous experiences that these children have at their own costs with their parents: the abandonment of the home, of a home, and the difficulty of a journey that is never easy or comfortable.
If we add to this separation and isolation the impact will be devastating, they will grow with severe psychological and integration problems, the right to attachment must be defended as fundamental to the human being, such as the thread that should never be broken between a child and his parents.
At the end of the day, as John Bowlby said, a young child still doesn’t know what death is, but she knows what the absence of a mother or father is, if the only people who can meet her needs are not present, she will feel all the anguish that can lead to the worst threats. The separation wound will begin to open and will be very difficult to heal afterwards.