Courtesy of Pam Martens
Source: CBS News
According to Dr. Colleen Kraft, President of the American Academy of Pediatrics, the U.S. President of the United States, Donald Trump, is deploying a policy of separating immigrant children from their parents at the U.S. southern border that is tantamount to child abuse. Speaking on CBS News (see video below), Dr. Kraft said when she visited a detention facility for separated children in Texas she saw a toddler girl “sobbing, wailing and beating her little fists on the mat.” She said staff there are told they are not allowed to hold a child to comfort them when they are crying.
Dr. Kraft explained that what this kind of emotional stress can do to a child is “disrupt the synapses and the neurological connections that are part of the developing brain.” When asked if the children can recover from this kind of trauma, Dr. Kraft said: “This type of trauma can be long lasting and it’s difficult to recover from this. We know very young children who are exposed to this type of trauma go on to not develop their speech, not develop their language, not develop their gross and fine motor skills and wind up with developmental delays.”
Millions of adult Americans know firsthand the emotional trauma that is caused to a child from a sudden separation from a nurturing parent. I am one of them.
When I was a very young girl my mother slipped in the bathtub and broke a rib. We had friendly, trustworthy neighbors who had a son my age. They offered to take me in until my mother was well enough to be released from the hospital. Although they went out of their way to be kind, the lasting image I have of that time was sitting by myself in a corner of their living room feeling abject terror at the thought I might never see my mother again.
I believe it was this incident that created my developmental lag which manifested itself in serious reading problems into the third grade. By the fourth grade, we were living with my grandmother, in her home located next door to my first cousins, in a loving, nurturing environment. I became a top student from that time on and went on to graduate high school as Valedictorian.
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