How family separation harms learning for the children left behind.
In a few days, my son returns to school. Over this past week, we’ve picked up his class schedule and school-issued laptop, had his school ID photo taken, and rummaged through our supply cupboards for paper, pencils, notebooks. New shoes wait by the door to replace his falling-apart ones of last year. A familiar process.
We reminisce about the summer: high points, low points, new experiences, loss, growth. There’s a shift in the air today. Storm clouds gather under late August heat, and thunder rolls ominously through the humidity. A sense of shifting seasons. Summer is coming to a close.
There’s resignation and hope in this. Embrace of return to familiar routines and optimism in a fresh start. Anticipation of reunions with friends and perhaps some teachers.
I think of his classmates, and especially of his elementary school. As an immigrant myself from a bilingual nation and first-generation child of immigrants from others, I understood how early schooling immersed in a foreign language fosters fluency. I wanted that for my son, for the value of biculturalism, bilingualism, and the challenge it would afford my quick learner. So we enrolled our five-year-old in a Spanish dual-immersion school where we found a vibrant and tight-knit community.
He was the only white boy amongst the one hundred kindergarteners, and one of few with no prior Spanish knowledge. The school model begins primarily in Spanish and shifts 10% more into English immersion every year, so that the pupils eventually receive instruction 50/50 in each language. Half of the students grew up in Spanish-only families, while half came from families where English was primarily used at home. While immigration status wasn’t disclosed, in this Title 1 (low income) 97% Latinx community, it’s a safe bet that there were many children of undocumented parents amongst us; many non-citizen pupils, too. They were all part of our community. We learned from one another: they, gathering English skills, and we, both parent and child, gathering Spanish – and cultural – understanding.
My son is in high school now, and only a few of those elementary connections remain, but the families are always on my heart these days. What is Back to School like when you are part of a community actively targeted by ICE raids? What does it mean for families to show up and participate as encouraged in their children’s education – a key factor for educational success1 – when public appearance feels constantly fraught? When speaking your native tongue has become reasonable suspicion and grounds for arrest in the newly militarized regime?
I think of the achievement divides between demographic groups; how socioeconomic and racial factors intersect with a hundred harsh variables to influence educational outcomes, and one truth weighs heavy on my mind: Fear and learning are incompatible. As a psychologist, I know how fear activates the brain’s amygdala, shutting down energy flow to the rational pre-frontal cortex, auditory cortex, and language centers of the brain. How stress hormones damage the hippocampus, the memory center of the brain. When we are in fear activation, we do not retain new information.2
And few things can cause fear in a young child’s mind like wondering if their parents will be gone by the final bell.
I imagine my son’s young classmates, and the children who now sit at those desks, lined up in front of those dear teachers who give selflessly to love and guide the students. I picture their families, the parents with whom I learned to communicate with a combination of hand gestures, broken but emerging language skills, and third-party translation from bilingual moms, smiles and laughter filling in the gaps of our efforts to connect. I picture those sweet brown faces of their children, hair tied back by loving hands into long braids behind shoulders, or cut neat and close and slicked into place with hair gel, school uniforms equalizing disparity in navy and tan.
I picture these children looking fearfully over their shoulders as they separate at the gate to enter school, hoping against hope their parents will both be there when the school day ends.
I imagine them staring out the classroom windows as fearful images of neighbors violently detained replay through their minds until Maestra gently places a hand on their shoulder and kindly directs them back to lessons that just don’t seem to matter much today.
Worse, I think of the children walking to school alone because Papá is incarcerated without trial for the non-violent misdemeanor of not having a current green card and Mamá is now afraid to leave the house. Who don’t know if the man who used to read them bedtime stories and help with homework after dinner will be back or when they will see him again or feel his strong, warm hug scooping them off their feet. Who long to see his proud smile and hear Felicidade, Mija! when she brings home a spelling test with 100 written at the top.
Who desperately need the free lunch at school now that Papá’s income is gone, though the ruling party’s new bill has cut funding for it. Sent to school by anxious mothers in pursuit of what may be the only meal they get that day. Trusting the principal who said they will not allow ICE inside school walls without warrant. Looking both ways as they walk home –not just for speeding cars, because they know that children who look like them have been taken by the federal masked thugs outside of schools here in Southern California.
My heart aches with awareness of how hard school will be for them this year.
Children of parents detained by ICE, like child survivors of other significant traumas, are struggling to sleep and having nightmares when they do. Impaired sleep compounds the deleterious impacts of trauma on learning capability. Not only does ancient history or correct spelling or the difference between an adverb and an adjective feel trivially unimportant when you don’t know if you’ll see your mother or father again, or whether your siblings or you yourself will be next, an exhausted brain simply cannot process or retain new information. Without safety, curiosity vanishes.
Trauma also leaves children emotionally shattered. Days of crying eventually subside into a hardened, self-protective edge. Irritability makes traumatized children prone to fighting, disrupting classrooms and creating a negative disciplinary record that will follow them. It damages social cohesion and pushes away the very support systems they need.
In addition to suffering the direct social fallout of a keyed-up nervous system, the left-behind child remains hypervigilant for signs of new danger, less protected in a frightening world, and uncertain when the next blow will come. They withdraw from others, subconsciously afraid to trust when relationships cannot be relied on to remain. Though emotions of loss and fear are high, they cannot trust that they can lean on their remaining support systems for fear of losing them, too – whether Maestra, Tia, Abuelo, or Mami. Lacking the emotional skills that come with maturity, many will withdraw into self-soothing diversions, such as substance use or video game addictions. These distractions may help in the moment, but the tummy aches and headaches that accompany them to school belie the truth that they carry, the trauma that infiltrates their bodies.
The trauma of having a parent abruptly ripped from a child’s life leaves a legacy of uncertainty and fear. When the very foundations of stability, of family, are bulldozed, nothing in the world feels safe or dependable. The child whose parent has been taken is left with a legacy of anxiety at a vulnerable time in brain development, when the experience of trauma and subsequent anxiety will be hardwired into their neural structures.
What a heavy load weighs down the shoulders of so many tens or hundreds of thousands of children returning to school this month! How dark a cloud hovers over the brightly colored classrooms where teachers pour out their hearts and expertise to engage young pupils.
I think of my son’s high school peers, shouldering schoolwork and after-school jobs to compensate for the loss of their incarcerated parents’ incomes. Short on sleep, unable to keep up with homework, dropping advanced classes just to get through the doubled demands. ICE actions chipping away at the futures of bright American students.
And I think of my young therapy client, a student too, whose father was taken. I picture the drawings of his Papá playing games with him, of the way he drew his father’s arm around his own shoulder, of the big smiles he illustrated when I asked him to draw his family. My client doesn’t smile now. He would have been heading back to school here too, but their family has resigned that it is no longer safe to remain in this country. We said goodbye. I could not help.
Families under assault. Friendships torn apart. A community fractured.
I send my son back to school this week, and my heart goes with him, as it always does. I wish him success, I wish him closeness with friends, I wish him confidence to overcome challenges.
And my heart goes with his classmates, his former classmates, and the millions of other immigrant and first-generation students returning this month. I wish them safety, I wish them hope, I wish them rest. And I wish them, too, the confidence, the connection, the success that may come more easily to my child.
But I wish it were not just a wish.
For more on the impacts of trauma on children and a self-paced healing guide, check out my award-winning Trauma Recovery Workbook for Teens (targeted for ages 12+).