What happens to a child when her mother is detained? What happens to a child who knows that other undocumented immigrants are being picked up and that it could happen to their father at any time?
A Washington Post article talks about the consequences of stress on poor kids - who have to deal with constant worries. How about the kids affected by our recent push on immigration enforcement?
Many of these kids are American citizens. But that didn't stop ICE from taking their parents (as in the case of Oscar Urbina, who has two U.S. citizen children - see yesterday's post "Auto Dealership Helps Deport Its Customer") What happens to the kids after their parents are taken away? They not only lose their parents, but the financial life of the family it turned upside down. How do they react to not having contact with their parents? - Since ICE often uses the tactic of not letting inmates communicate with anyone on the outside?
Two years ago on a trip to Washington, D.C. I made with a group of DREAMers, I found that many of them had experienced one of their parent's being deported. While they had still been successful in school, their emotional lives had been scarred, not only from being DREAMers, but also from having been forcibly separated from a parent. Their cognitive abilities were not affected by the stress (most are very successful in school), their strong emotional constitution helped them keep going. But at what cost?
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Research Link Poor Kids Stress, Brain Empairment
by Rob Stein
Washington Post
April 6, 2009(excerpt)...When the researchers analyzed the relationships among how long the children lived in poverty, their allostatic load and their later working memory, they found a clear relationship: The longer they lived in poverty, the higher their allostatic load and the lower they tended to score on working-memory tests. Those who spent their entire childhood in poverty scored about 20 percent lower on working memory than those who were never poor, Evans said.
"The greater proportion of your childhood that your family spent in poverty, the poorer your working memory, and that link is largely explained by this chronic physiologic stress," Evans said. "We put these things together and can say the reason we get this link between poverty and deficits in working memory is this chronic elevated stress."
McEwen said the findings are consistent with earlier research in animals and brain imaging studies in people indicating that the body's response to stress, such as chronically elevated levels of cortisol, can adversely affect the brain, including the regions involved in working memory.
"This fits into a whole network of research," McEwen said. "It's a really exciting story."
Other researchers cautioned that more work is needed to explore and confirm the findings, and that chronic stress is probably one of the many factors affecting a child's development. But they said the results provided insight into the connection between poverty and achievement.
"One of the questions that health psychologists have been very interested in exploring is how is it that something outside the body literally gets under the skin and into the brain," said Avshalom Caspi, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University. "What this article says is that one of the reasons that poverty does make such an important difference is that it affects many physiological systems, and those systems, once stressed, may compromise brain development."
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The findings indicate that education standards and other government policies that aim to improve poor children's performance in school should consider the stress they are experiencing at home, Evans said.
"It's not just 'Read to our kids and take them to the library,' " he said. "We need to take into account that chronic stress takes a toll not only on their health, but it may take a toll on their cognitive functioning." link to complete article
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