+
Family

The trauma will be long-lasting for kids separated at the border. Here's what you need to know.

The Trump administration's "zero tolerance" policy has been horrifying.

More than 2,300 children have been separated from their parents at the border — and people across the nation are outraged. The widespread response raised more than $18 million to aid separated families and even forced President Donald Trump to sign an executive order to detain families together rather than separately.

Progress is being made, but the trauma these children have undergone will have dangerous long-term consequences.

The path to reunification for these children is fraught with uncertainty. And no executive order can undo the trauma these children are experiencing right now.


Even brief separations from parents and families can leave lasting, persisting impressions on young minds. When these separations are lengthy, they cause an anxiety that puts children at risk of any number of psychological syndromes from separation anxiety to depression to post-traumatic stress disorder and beyond.

In the past several weeks, stories of separation trauma have flooded the news, and their message is clear: The horror of being torn from one's parents has lifelong effects. The granddaughter of a man who was separated from his parents at Angel Island in the 1930s wrote that her grandfatherfelt the pain of a 34-day separation at age 9 for his entire life. He spoke about that separation even up until to the week before his death.

Writer Dell Cameron, who was sent to foster care during a custody battle, notes that workers at such centers often have no understanding of the children they're caring for. When these kids inevitably act out as a response to their emotional stress, they are punished. "Hope is what I lost as a child. It was destroyed by the state," Cameron wrote. "Detaining children when parents love them and want them is a crime against humanity."

Even when children are reunited with their parents, their sense of safety can be forever altered.

For many years, it's been assumed that children bounce back from trauma like this fairly quickly. They may not understand it, the reasoning went, and they might even forget it. But empirical evidence has shown that to be untrue: Sudden separation can alter brain functioning.

Recent research has made it clear that the trauma of being torn away from a primary caregiver can affect not only social relationships and academic performance in childhood but also follow the individual into adulthood, altering every aspect of their existence, from their ability to connect with others to their careers.

Yoka Verdoner, a child survivor of the Holocaust, recounted her experiences of being sent into hiding during World War II and how what happened to her at age 7 affected her development permanently. "In later life, I was never able to really settle down," she wrote for The Guardian. "I lived in different countries and was successful in work, but never able to form lasting relationships with partners. I never married."

Verdoner's sister, who was 5 at the time of the separation, has suffered from a depression that Verdoner describes as "lifelong and profound." Her brother, now in his 80s, is still trying to process what happened. His anxiety has made it difficult for him to function. "He revisits the separation obsessively," Verdoner lamented. "He still writes about it in the present tense."

The American Psychological Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics have both condemned and denounced these kinds of separations as harmful and inhumane. "Separating children from their parents contradicts everything we stand for as pediatricians — protecting and promoting children’s health," reads a statement from AAP president Dr. Colleen Kraft. "We can and must do better for these families. We can and must remember that immigrant children are still children; they need our protection, not prosecution."

Children can heal from trauma — but there is no quick fix or easy solution.

Though trauma can't be undone, it can be healed. But that takes time and understanding. Children must be reunited with parents as quickly as possible and given care by practitioners who are trained and skilled at working with marginalized youth. They must be given hope — as they were when hundreds of New Yorkers showed up to support them at LaGuardia Airport.

Most importantly, we must keep our elected officials accountable for the choices they make in the near (and distant) future. The separation of children from their parents may be ending, but family internment is not a viable or humane solution. Those seeking asylum aren't criminals. Kids, especially, are not at fault.

Our voices have power. We must take action to put to end this injustice.

Sponsored

ACUVUE launches a new campaign to inspire Gen Z to put down their phones and follow their vision

What will you create on your social media break? Share it at #MyVisionMySight.

True

If you’ve always lived in a world with social media, it can be tough to truly understand how it affects your life. One of the best ways to grasp its impact is to take a break to see what life is like without being tethered to your phone and distracted by a constant stream of notifications.

Knowing when to disconnect is becoming increasingly important as younger people are becoming aware of the adverse effects screen time can have on their eyes. According to Eyesafe Nielsen, adults are now spending 13-plus hours a day on their digital devices, a 35% increase from 2019.1. Many of us now spend more time staring at screens on a given day than we do sleeping which can impact our eye health.

Normally, you blink around 15 times per minute, however, focusing your eyes on computer screens or other digital displays have been shown to reduce your blink rate by up to 60%.2 Reduced blinking can destabilize your eyes’ tear film, causing dry, tired eyes and blurred vision.3

Keep ReadingShow less

Karlie Smith shows the meal she's bringing to the restaurant for her son.

A mom who admitted she packs her 2-year-old a meal when they go out to dinner has started an interesting debate on TikTok about restaurant etiquette and how it applies to young children.

The video posted by Ohio mom, Karlie Smith (unbreakablemomma on TikTok), has received nearly 600,000 views and has over 1,850 comments.

“Call me cheap, call me whatever, but if we’re going out to a restaurant, I’m packing my kid a meal," Smith, 21, said in her post. "I do this for many reasons. On Friday nights, my family and I get together, and tonight, we’re getting food out. My son is not getting food out.”

Keep ReadingShow less
Pop Culture

Man rewatches shows from his childhood and his recaps of the bonkers storylines are priceless

Rob Anderson's hilarious recaps of shows like "Mighty Ducks," "Beethoven," and "7th Heaven" might make you wonder how they got made in the first place.

@hearthrobert/TikTok

These plots makes zero sense.

While there are no doubt some timeless classics from our childhood that remain every bit as amazing as we remember, many are straight-up cringey upon a later viewing. Really, it’s to be expected as societal viewpoints change…sort of a marker of how far we’ve collectively come.

And so, what do we do with these problematic pieces of old-school pop culture? Well, we can certainly update them to better reflect a more modern attitude, but that also comes with a set of potential problems. Or we could simply never watch them again. Certainly an option given all the content out there. But then we might miss an opportunity to better understand what seemed to work for the mainstream then, and why it doesn’t work now.

And then there’s the third option—allow ourselves to be entertained by their cringiness.

That’s certainly the route taken by Rob Anderson. Over on TikTok, Anderson has taken ultra-popular movies and television shows from his childhood and given them hilarious recaps capturing how absurd some of the storylines are.
Keep ReadingShow less
@Steve_Perrault/Twitter

Some moments never get old.

On November 19, 1999, a man named John Carpenter made game show history and quite possibly gave us all the greatest game show moment of all time.

Carpenter was a contestant on the very first season of “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” shot in America. Hosted by the late Regis Philbin, the quiz show featured three "lifeline" options to help them with difficult questions, the most popular being able to “Phone-a-Friend.”

Carpenter had impressively not used a single lifeline for any of his questions. That is, until question 15. The million-dollar question, to be exact.

Keep ReadingShow less
Joy

Woman decides that she is the love of her life and marries herself at her retirement home

“I said, you know what, I’ve done everything else. Why not?”

77-year-old woman decides she's the love of her life and marries herself.

We joke about marrying ourselves or a platonic friend if some arbitrary amount of time has passed without a proposal from an imaginary suitor. And sure, some people do wind up marrying a friend in more of a business arrangement, but it's not very common that someone follows through with marrying themselves.

Dorothy "Dottie" Fideli, decided that she was going to break the mold. The 77-year-old sat down and thought about all of the things she had done in life and who was with her the entire time cheering her on. It was an easy answer: herself. She was her biggest cheerleader, the person who always showed up and the love of her life, so Fideli made the plan to marry herself.

On a beautiful May day, friends and family gathered in the O’Bannon Terrace Retirement Community, where Fideli is a resident, to witness the ceremony.

Keep ReadingShow less
Joy

12-year-old Texas girl saves her family from carbon monoxide poisoning

She knew something was wrong with her mom and brother, which wound up saving her whole family.

Fort Worth 12-year-old helps save family from carbon monoxide poisoning.

Carbon monoxide is called a silent killer for a reason. Many people don't realize they're experiencing carbon monoxide poisoning before it's too late. The gas is colorless and odorless and tends to have a sedating effect that causes people to sleep through the fatal poisoning. Having carbon monoxide detectors is one of the most effective ways to identify the gas before it's too late to get out of the house, but not every home has one.

A little girl in Fort Worth, Texas, experienced a terrifying encounter with the deadly gas, but her quick actions saved her entire family. Jaziyah Parker is being held up as a hero after she realized something was wrong with her family members and called for help.

The girl called 911 after she noticed her mom pass out. On the call with the dispatcher, Jaziyah says she thinks her mother has died before explaining that there was something now wrong with her baby brother, who was just 5-months-old.

Keep ReadingShow less

Drew Barrymore speaks during the FLOWER Beauty launch at Westfield Parramatta on April 13, 2019, in Sydney, Australia.

Drew Barrymore, 48, has been in the public consciousness since she starred as Gertie in 1982’s mega-blockbuster, “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial,” a performance that earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. So, it makes sense that many people of a certain age feel as if they’ve grown up with her.

Barrymore has consistently starred in hit films and movies that are rewatchable cable-TV staples, such as “Charlie's Angels” (2000), “Never Been Kissed” (1999), “Scream” (1996), “The Wedding Singer” (1998), “50 First Dates” (2004) and “Fever Pitch” (2005).

Now, she’s an even more significant part of people’s lives as the host of “The Drew Barrymore Show,” which runs every weekday on CBS. So far, the show has been a big success, attracting an average of 1.21 million views per show, and ranks as the #4 talk show in syndication. It was recently renewed through the 2024 season.

Keep ReadingShow less