Trump Doesn't Study Child Development.

President Trump displays two character traits prominent in news stories this week: he operates with an "unsubmitted will" and he doesn't study child development, once telling Howard Stern, "I'll supply funds and she'll take care of the kids." The latter is forgivable - I didn't know it was state law to drive with a childseat in the car when transporting toddler-aged children until about ten years ago. A lot has changed since I was a kid.

The latter is forgivable, but the latter combined with the former is creating problems for innocent kids who did not choose their parents and kids who had no power over their parents' decision to migrate.

What does it mean Trump operates with an "unsubmitted will"? This is in the public record. On the first two seasons of "The Apprentice," Trump implored his proteges, the contestants, to never apologize for their actions. This has been lost from public memory but someone has the tapes or DVDs. More recently, however, Trump has used public statements on Twitter to demand apologies from situational adversaries including ABC's Bob Iger or ESPN the network. So he demands submission but he personally operates by a rule to never submit (via apology.)

People who operate with an "unsubmitted will" do not choose their battles selectively. They just dominate. They may not be conscious of this internal policy. So President Trump may not back down from his family separation policy any time soon. What about the mid-level workers carrying out this "zero tolerance" directive?

This means people working at the child detention centers, and ICE workers, may unknowingly be breaking kidnapping laws, child neglect laws, child endangerment laws, child abuse laws, may be committing fraud to carry out "zero tolerance" orders from Attorney General Sessions. These "detention center" workers could face criminal and misdemeanor charges down the road for such violations (this is not a threat, as I am not a lawyer, I just want these workers to be informed so they don't break the law unknowingly.)

President Trump probably won't come to the defense of these workers if they're prosecuted, so the laws and these workers' responsibilities should be publicized, now, in the border states where these detention centers are located.

ICE workers at the border should not be -- should be reminded the legal implications of -- committing fraud in order to detain migrants at the border. And they should not be lying to migrant parents -- as some news reports suggest they are doing -- by saying "your child needs a bath" in order to separate a child from a parent, then later informing the parent that child is not returning.

At the very least, ICE workers need to inform a parent of their right to turn back from the border (if they do have a right.) And ICE and detention center workers need to make clear to these migrant parents their children will be taken away if they proceed forward at the border.

It's abusive to take a baby away from his or her parents and not place it in care of a primary caregiver he can attach to within a reasonable timeframe. This affects child development as proved by psychologist Henry Harlow in the 1950s with his rhesus monkeys:

Monkeys who had soft, tactile contact with their terry cloth mothers behaved quite differently than monkeys whose mothers were made out of cold, hard wire. Harlow hypothesized that members of the first group benefitted from a psychological resource—emotional attachment—unavailable to members of the second. By providing reassurance and security to infants, cuddling kept normal development on track.

What exactly did Harlow see that convinced him emotional attachment made a decisive developmental difference? When the experimental subjects were frightened by strange, loud objects, such as teddy bears beating drums, monkeys raised by terry cloth surrogates made bodily contact with their mothers, rubbed against them, and eventually calmed down. Harlow theorized that they used their mothers as a “psychological base of operations,” allowing them to remain playful and inquisitive after the initial fright had subsided. In contrast, monkeys raised by wire mesh surrogates did not retreat to their mothers when scared. Instead, they threw themselves on the floor, clutched themselves, rocked back and forth, and screamed in terror. These activities closely resembled the behaviors of autistic and deprived children frequently observed in institutions as well as the pathological behavior of adults confined to mental institutions, Harlow noted. The awesome power of attachment and loss over mental health and illness could hardly have been performed more dramatically.

In subsequent experiments, Harlow’s monkeys proved that “better late than never” was not a slogan applicable to attachment. When Harlow placed his subjects in total isolation for the first eights months of life, denying them contact with other infants or with either type of surrogate mother, they were permanently damaged. Harlow and his colleagues repeated these experiments, subjecting infant monkeys to varied periods of motherlessness. They concluded that the impact of early maternal deprivation could be reversed in monkeys only if it had lasted less than 90 days, and estimated that the equivalent for humans was six months.

Reports are emerging that children forcibly separated from parents are very young. Michigan authorities report this evening:

“This week, I have been in touch with various agencies and organizations working with these vulnerable children. We have received reports and are very concerned that the children arriving here are much younger than those who have been transported here in the past. Some of the children are infants as young as three months of age and are completely unable to advocate for themselves.

For the sake of these infants: It would be wise for people not to wait for Trump to submit. Legal experts on child abuse laws and fraud surely can provide information as to what abuse laws these ICE workers and detention center workers carrying out these "zero tolerance" directives may be violating, so the workers can stop, quit, or at least know what laws they may be breaking as they're separating families.

The directives from Washington are very vague. As the AP says:

Even the policy surrounding what age to take away a baby is inconsistent. Customs and Border Protection field chiefs over all nine southwest border districts can use their discretion over how young is too young, officials said. And while Health and Human Services defines “tender age” typically as 12 and under, Customs and Border Protection has at times defined it as 5 and under.

Give these babies some caregivers who can serve as a "psychological base of operations" while they wait to reunite with their parents.

Because this, reported in the Washington Post, surely must qualify as abuse: "In other instances, pediatricians and child advocates have reported seeing toddlers crying inconsolably for their mothers at shelters where staff are prohibited from physically comforting them."

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Quotes & Links:

We’ve published two fact-checks about family separations, but it turns out these Trumpian claims have a zombie quality and keep popping up in new ways.

In the latest iteration, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen tweeted and then said at a White House briefing that the administration does not have “a policy of separating families at the border.” This is Orwellian stuff. Granted, the administration has not written regulations or policy documents that advertise, “Hey, we’re going to separate families.” But that’s the inevitable consequence, as Nielsen and other Trump administration officials acknowledge.

- WashingtonPost.com

6/21/2018 - "All she knew, she said, was what a social worker there had told her: She would be allowed to call her daughter twice a week, on Tuesday and Thursday — “no más.” She would need to fill out lots of paperwork. She should not attempt to visit. And she should not expect to reunite with her daughter for a month. Maybe two."

- nytimes.com

The bait-and-switch and lack of tracking used by ICE to separate asylum-seekers at the border is much worse than the existing legal family separation policies listed in the article.   nytimes.com






This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.





This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.