Donald Trump, Jeff Sessions and Kirstjen Nielsen are what you were afraid was hiding under your bed when you were a child. Dr. Colleen Kraft is the President of the American Academy of Pediatrics. She was on CNN today to discuss what she saw, visiting one of these centers; and more importantly, what the results of what she saw could and would be on the children being kept in Trump and Session’s prison camps. A couple of days ago, Kraft was quoted by the Washington Post as saying that upon visiting a small shelter at the Texas/Mexico border, and being told she could not console a toddler “no older than 2,” who had just been separated from her mother, that the people working at these detention centers are not allowed to “touch the children.”
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“The really devastating thing was that we all knew what was going on with this child. We all knew what the problem was,” Kraft said. “She didn’t have her mother, and none of us can fix that.”
The basic needs of these young children were not being met. It’s not about food and a television; it’s about providing love and comfort. It’s child abuse. In the interview on CNN, Dr. Kraft explained that young children left in situations like this without any solace will begin producing hormones due to a condition called toxic stress. Toxic stress becomes a problem when a child is not brought back down to a more normal and safe feeling. Something that cannot happen when you are under siege from the government of the United States. As PBS explains, the children staying on high alert are having their brain architecture altered at the worst possible time in their early development.
In a situation where children are separated from their parents for a long period of time, they remain on high alert, and their bodies endure prolonged and severe toxic stress as a result. That interrupts the brain’s architecture at a critical time of development, when neural circuits — the pathways necessary to carry information to and from the brain — are forming rapidly, at a rate of more than 1 million neural connections each second in infants and toddlers. Stress hormones block those neurons. This can lead to delayed development in reason, learning and emotional development. This stress can overwhelm the hippocampus, the brain’s built-in shutdown valve for the stress hormone cortisol. If continuously exposed to toxic stress over time, damage done to the child’s brain cannot be changed, studies have shown.
All of this being so much science talk, CNN’s Kate Bolduan asks this simple question:
Do you really think this amounts to child abuse?
Dr. Kraft is unequivocal in her response.
This is child abuse. These children have been traumatized up on their trip to the border; and the first thing that happens is that we take away the one constant in their life that helps them buffer all of these horrible experiences. That’s child abuse.
There has been a ton of scholarly work done on the effects of childhood stress, and more specifically toxic stress. None of that work finds positives in abusing children.
If you want to donate to groups that are advocating and fighting for these children and their families, you can head over here.