Trauma has altered separated children's brains and their lives forever: Alyse C. Hachey

Alyse C. Hachey
Special to the El Paso Times
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The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services released photos of the facility in Tornillo, Texas, being used to house immigrant children.

I will leave the politics of this issue to the politicians. I am not one of them. I will leave the morality and ethics of the issue to the religious leaders and philosophers. I am not one of them. I will leave the history of this issue to the historians. I am not one of them, either. 

What am I? I am a cognitive developmental psychologist. So, I will speak to the psychological and the neurological impact of what has happened and is still happening to the separated immigrant children, even the small portion who have been reunited with their parents. Decades of evidence from multiple disciplines of research offer strong support for the potential for lifelong harm for these children. The likely psychological and neurological impact on what happened to them is well documented.

Alyse C. Hachey has a doctorate in educational psychology, with a specialization in human development and cognition, from Columbia University. She is a teacher educator and an expert in early childhood education. Hachey is a resident of El Paso.

More:Immigrant parents talk about being separated from their children

Parent relationships are centrally important; there is overwhelming evidence that a children’s attachment to their parent, particularly mothers, is critical to healthy development. Parents meet two fundamental human needs, the need for relatedness and the need for belonging. These fundamental human needs impact a wide range of behaviors and guide how children develop by influencing emotions and thinking. Specifically for younger children, parental bonds create a way of interpreting and understanding their immediate environment that is tied directly to the parent. For these more than 2,300 children, who left everything and everyone they knew coming to the U.S. border, their parents represented the only relatedness and belonging they had.  When these bonds were abruptly cut, at that moment of separation, psychological damage was already done.  

Even more devastating, research shows that social exclusion (the opposite of belonging and relatedness created by the parental relationship) activates in the brain the anterior cingulate cortex and this activation is dampened by activation of the right ventral prefrontal cortex. This is a lot of technical talk, but what does it mean? This particular array of brain activation produces neural activation similar to those patterns seen for physical pain. The parental deprivation that these children experienced at the border produced pain, both emotional and at a brain-level, potentially even physical.

Moreover, abundant evidence contends that when children face strong, frequent, or prolonged adversity without adequate support from parents and attached adults, such as is currently being experienced by separated children here in Tornillo and across the U.S., it causes a stress response that can have terrible consequences. This “toxic stress” impacts the actual physical neurology of children’s brains, and their developing mind and the body.  

I am particularly concerned for children in the “Tender-Age” centers here in Texas, as the human brain undergoes massive development and re-organization that has a lifelong impact during the first six years of life. This brain development is directly connected to a child’s social and emotional well-being (or lack thereof). With the current lack of ability to reunite children and parents, the youngest children may remain in government care for months or longer, during which time the continued separation from their parents compounds their trauma and continues the negative effects on every aspect of development. Evidence shows that children who were initially reared in institutionalized care, even if ultimately raised in stable and loving homes, have biological and psychological consequences many years later. Because there is an effect at the brain level, the possible negative effects are widespread, including problems with attention, language and social functioning, along with mental illness and physical health issues. And any or all of these could continue into and throughout adulthood. 

More:Federal judge orders separated families at border be reunited within 30 days

Further, the harm is not necessarily “fixed” just by reuniting children with their parents. Adverse and highly stressful childhood experiences, including the incarceration of a parent or family member, are well-recognized in the research as precursors for negative health outcomes later in life. Data suggest that up to 30 percent of later mental disorders are related to childhood adversity. And the psychological distress, anxiety, and depression associated with separation from a parent follow the children well after the immediate period of separation and even after eventual reunification with a parent or other family members.

As a cognitive developmental psychologist, I am deeply concerned about the long-term impact on all of these children’s health and well-being caused by the forced separation from their parents. Put bluntly, the forced separation has altered their brains. It has impacted their psyche. It has put all of these children at increased risk for both physical and mental illness for the rest of their lives. 


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