Parents and children and money

Writing in The Washington Post, James A. Coan, a clinical psychologist and neuroscientist, considers the long-term effect on children of separation from their parents and concludes that “the Trump administration is committing violence against children”:

At minimum, forced separation will cause these children extreme emotional distress. Most of us know this intuitively. Less intuitive, as Nim Tottenham of Columbia University told me, is that “the sadness is not the thing that really matters here. What matters is this is a trauma to the developing nervous system.”

And:

Charles Nelson, a pediatrics professor at Harvard Medical School, provided the comprehensive long-term view: As those children grow and develop into adults, the combination of chronic inflammation and behavioral inflexibility will impair their health in at least two ways — through direct weathering of their bodies and less effective problem-solving, impulse control and decision-making.

Just to make sure I’d heard him right, I said: “So psychological trauma is mediating a pathway to brain trauma, and that is affecting behavior down the road, which can affect health and longevity?” He replied: “Yeah, you got it.”

A recent New York Times editorial about the Trump administration’s barbaric policy of separating children from their parents at the U.S.–Mexico border listed five groups accepting contributions: Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley, The Florence Project, Kids in Need of Defense, The Texas Civil Rights Project, and The Young Center. Hint, hint: tomorrow is Father’s Day. It’s a good time to give something.