Why Does The Press Only Seem To Care About Broken Attachments For Border-Crossing Children?

Jun 21, 2018 by

by By Paula Rinehart, The Federalist:

Children all over the U.S. suffer the same kind of trauma as those at the border, but it seems the press only cares about the children when it serves liberal ideological ends.

Pediatricians and immigrant advocates in South Texas are sounding the alarm that separating migrant children from their parents is giving them “toxic stress.” Change.org offers a tool kit to protest this trauma. Report after report features distraught children torn from the arms of their parents. This really is a tragic picture, although the parents put themselves at risk by heading across the border in spite of warnings they would be separated from their children.

A deeper question, though, lurks beneath this sudden concern for the welfare of children at the border. The repercussions associated with broken attachments and disrupted bonding are widely known and extensively researched. But why has the spotlight landed on migrant children in particular, when so many others in the United States suffer the same kind of trauma? It seems attachment theory is only relevant to the press when it serves liberal ideological ends.

A Deafening Silence

For children tossed around in foster care, for example, the silence around broken bonding is deafening. It’s as though notions of bonding, attachment, and the developmental needs of children do not exist.

In the current crisis of opioid addiction and foster care, many children form attachments to a family who wants to adopt them, often waiting up to three years for a birth parent or blood relative to come forward or enter drug treatment. These children live in foster care Never-Never Land, but they also bond with a family while they wait. All too often, these children are then ripped out of the only family they have ever known, suffering the trauma of broken attachments, over and over again. This is the tragedy that doesn’t make the news.

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