Trauma’s Impact on Young Children

Justine’s and Zahra’s stories reveal the prevalence of deaths: the destruction of communities and families among refugees. This report uses the term “trauma,” following the growing awareness of its impacts on young children among civilians and policymakers, despite the risk of "psychiatric universalism." Trauma among young children is defined as “an actual or perceived danger that undermines a child’s sense of physical or emotional safety or poses a threat to the safety of the child’s parents or caregivers, overwhelms their coping ability, and impacts their functioning and development.”

Trauma cannot be isolated as the malfunction of the mind and removed from cultural and regional specificities; trauma is rooted in geopolitics, race, gender, and economic disparity. Living under poverty and other structural inequalities impacts young children’s development with lifelong consequences. Young children who live in poverty are more vulnerable to negative effects of trauma than are children living in higher-income families. According to child development scholar Hirok Yoshikawa, disastrous work conditions–including low wages and job duties that come with little opportunity for self-direction or autonomy—and lower access to center-based childcare lead to lower scores on measures of vocabulary, motor, and perceptual skills in children at 36 months.

Contrary to popular belief that young children are immune to traumatic situations, they are actually experiencing the most severe of consequences and are the most vulnerable to long-term negative effects of trauma. Trauma during the early years can damage the cortex, the hippocampus, and the amygdala of the brain. Children as young as three-months-old have demonstrated post-traumatic stress symptoms. Trauma disrupts healthy development by interfering with a child’s ability to develop positive relationships with adults and peers, to learn and play, and to self-regulate their emotions, attention, and behavior.

In addition to structural barriers, young children of immigrants—particularly refugees—are more likely than their peers to experience trauma due to experiences before, during, and after migration, particularly due to exposure to violence and separation from family members. Young children of immigrants experience a range of violence, including wars and genocides directly or through their parents and caretakers, being a product of rape, family separation, being raised by mothers who were blinded by witnessing atrocities, or witnessing the shooting of one’s parents as toddlers by a police officer. There has been recent development to recognize these particular obstacles experienced by children of immigrants. The original landmark research on adverse childhood experiences—events related to abuse, neglect, and household challenges of parental separation, substance abuse, incarceration, violence, and mental illness—overlooked children of immigrants because they focus on conditions inside the home rather than community or outside actors. The updated survey includes: racism, witnessing violence outside the home, bullying, losing a parent to deportation, living in an unsafe neighborhood, involvement with the foster care system, experiencing homelessness, living in a war zone, witnessing a family member being abused, involvement with the criminal justice system, and attending a school that enforces a zero-tolerance discipline policy. Children of immigrants can be impacted by the trauma experienced by members of their community even if their own family was not directly affected—a phenomenon called historical trauma. Historical trauma leads many members of the community to feel a pervasive sense of hopelessness. Moreover, the trauma of children of immigrants often continues in the United States from discrimination and bullying, problems in school, and struggles with their own or family members’ acculturation.

Language and cultural barriers can prevent caretakers, teachers, and other staff from helping young children. Furthermore, immigrant and refugee families are less likely to access early education services that can be a touchpoint for other supports. In general, immigrant populations are less likely to seek mental health services due to the lack of language access and culturally relevant services, financial burden, and cultural stigmas around mental health. Asian Americans are three times less likely to seek mental health services than are white Americans. Only 22 percent of Latinx Americans and 25 percent of Black Americans received care among a survey of people with diagnosed need for mental health care. Trauma can become normalized within a community that has been through shared violence—everyone has nightmares, everyone has insomnia, everyone is sad—decreasing the likelihood of seeking treatment. Additionally, the Western framework of mental illness might not be culturally appropriate. Others simply might not know about the various resources available.

The parents’ citizenship status has a tremendous impact on their young children’s mental health: Children living with unauthorized parents are more likely than their peers with parents who are U.S. born or legal immigrants to experience psychological distress and economic instability, factors tied to negative child development. Additionally, maternal depression—widespread among low-income mothers—has been linked to negative impact on young children’s cognitive, socioemotional, and behavioral development. Excessive maternal stress can negatively affect genetic programming during fetal development, leading to undesirable birth outcomes, such as preterm births and low birth weight. Infants born to women who experienced four or more childhood adversities were two to five times more likely to have poor physical and emotional health outcomes by 18 months of age.

Policy debates, often times dehumanizing, about undocumented immigrants fail to consider the effects on the children of policies targeting the undocumented. Contemporary immigration actions and rhetoric have had profound and far-reaching adverse impacts on immigrant parents and their children. Specifically, the Trump administration’s immigration policy shifted the way large numbers of families, including many U.S. citizen children, understand and live their lives. Since late 2016, doctors and service providers report having seen more children exhibiting stress- and anxiety-related behavioral changes, including symptoms of toxic stress, due to fear that a family member will be deported.

The American Academy of Pediatrics expressed concerns for the development of children’s bodies and brains due to exposure to prolonged, unmitigated anxiety that their parents will be taken into custody or deported. Toxic stress produces damaging effects on learning, behavior, and health across the lifespan. The research demonstrates that more adverse experiences in childhood leads to greater likelihood of developmental delays and later health problems, including heart disease, diabetes, substance abuse, and depression. Toxic stress disrupts children’s brain architecture and affects their short- and long-term health, which is particularly critical during the first two years of life when rapid brain development occurs, according to Julie Linton, a co-chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics’s immigrant-health special-interest group.

Not only is trauma especially prevalent in early childhood, infants and toddlers cannot verbalize their feelings, talk about frightening events, or describe their nightmares. As a result, toddlers might express toxic stress through temper tantrums, learning problems, memory issues, going to the bathroom, or having trouble eating or sleeping. Even before birth, immigration enforcement has been shown to put children’s health at risk. Premature and underweight births—complications that put babies at risk for infant death or long-term health problems—were shown to be connected with the 2008 worksite raid in Postville, Iowa (the largest single-site immigration raid in U.S. history): babies born to Latinx mothers in Iowa within 37 weeks of the raid were 24 percent more likely to be underweight compared to births over the same amount of time one year earlier. This increased risk was not found in babies born to non-Latinx white mothers in Iowa.

Intensified anti-immigration policies and rhetoric, particularly in the four years of the Trump administration, produced anxiety across the entire vastly diverse immigrant population regardless of their immigration status. A George Washington University study of 213 Latinx parents of adolescent children echoes the heightened fear. Among the surveyed participants, 80 percent worried about family separation; 70 percent struggled to imagine being in a better job or making more money; 60 percent worried it would be hard for their child to get a job; and 58 percent worried it would be hard for their child to finish school. That is, immigrant parents, regardless of their status, expressed anxiety about their daily existence, family unity, and their children’s future in the United States. Even parents of U.S. citizen children were just as likely to worry about their children’s opportunities to finish school and to warn their children to stay away from authorities as parents of noncitizens. The researchers add that parents’ psychological distress harms their children: “adolescents whose parents are depressed and/or anxious face heightened risk of poor social functioning, academic failure, and mental health problems.”