To the editor:
The cruel and escalating mistreatment of immigrants at our southern border is disgraceful and heartbreaking, even if one believes the claims that the immigrants pose a genuine threat to our country.
Having worked for 55 years in special education, I address here the continuing mistreatment of the children (please email johnwillisteacher55@gmail.com for links to further information).
I provided, and taught graduate students to provide individual psychoeducational evaluations for children, so I am painfully familiar with the life-long effects of trauma on children. Any parent recalling the first day of school knows how upsetting even a planned, benevolent, brief separation from approving parents can be. A sudden, harsh, prolonged separation from a distraught parent with no clear end in sight is unimaginably traumatic and can cause post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). I have worked with children adopted from orphanages who developed reactive attachment disorder (RAD). Incarceration with frightened, confused parents is better than parental separation, but nonetheless traumatic.
The growing body of research on Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) is especially troubling. The effects of ACEs are cumulative, and four or more make it especially likely that serious mental and physical disabilities will endure into adulthood. For an immigrant child seeking asylum, the awful conditions that forced them to leave their childhood home; the resulting disconnection from family members; the long, stressful, and dangerous trek north; and arrest at the border constitute four ACEs. Incarceration along with a parent or, even worse, separation from parent(s), even for what an adult might consider a short time, adds a fifth ACE with sadly predictable consequences.
The continuing mistreatment of immigrant children is inhumane, unnecessary, and inexcusable and will have long-lasting consequences. It does even more harm to the soul of our great nation than it does to the children. It must be stopped right now.
John O. Willis, Ed.D.
Peterborough