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NACoA Urges Adequate Child Trauma-Informed Training for Those Assigned to Implement Reunification of Migrant Children and Parents

 

Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) can have extraordinarily damaging impacts on a growing child.  The National Association for Children of Addiction (NACoA) has a keen understanding of such childhood impacts based on 35 years of work with children who have suffered from parental addiction, and our grounding in a growing body of research related to childhood trauma.

NACoA’s Board of Directors and staff are populated with experts from a variety of health, legal, and allied professions involved with the care and welfare of children. Our collective experience helps us understand the ways in which stress and trauma can have lasting—even permanent—negative effects on the brains and behaviors of growing children. Involuntary separation of a child from his or her parent is a significant source of trauma that can result in such negative outcomes.

NACoA acknowledges the President's Executive Order as a welcomed first step to keep families together who have become trapped in the migrant family separation crisis that has plagued the immigration system for many years. NACoA is hopeful that additional efforts will be made by the Congress to remedy the long overdue immigration policies that harm  struggling families who are attempting to find safety in the United States through illegal means. 

However, NACoA has great concern for the short and long term health of developing children who have been traumatized in their home countries, and who have been re-traumatized  by being separated from their families upon arrival in this country. NACoA was founded 35 years ago by a group of social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists and educators who had all seen in their practices the potential damage that accrued to children living in the chronic emotional stress that parental addiction created in their families. 

Twenty years ago,  the CDC demonstrated, through the extraordinary CDC-Kaiser Permanente Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study, that living in such toxic stress increases harm to children's lifetime trajectory in social, emotional development, and physical health, primarily because of the brain alterations that impeded normal brain development resulting from toxic stress in childhood. Recent research also reveals that autoimmune diseases and other physical ailments are increased in children suffering traumatic events in their early life. The previously published ACE studies verify this conclusion.

When there were protective factors and at least one nurturing and supportive adult that intervened during their childhood years, these children often become resilient. NACoA's prevention, intervention and support programs have been changing the life  trajectory of countless thousands of children and youth who have learned to survive and thrive because of the educational support programs created by NACoA and made available in schools, faith communities, counseling offices, addiction treatment facilities, enlightened pediatric offices and community youth service agencies. Such targeted interventions can be the most important prevention strategies for mediating the harm toxic stress impacts on developing children, as seen in the productive lives of these adult children of addicted parents who received the help they needed and now thrive in spite of their childhood home environment.

All children who have been traumatized should have the opportunity to receive the services that science has demonstrated will ameliorate the damage, including where the government has been a factor in causing the trauma. Those who are charged with managing the enormous human and logistical issues in the present crisis and, at the same time, provide support that will not further traumatize the children, will need training and program strategies from those most experienced in helping children to survive and thrive in traumatic environments.

NACoA's 35-year history of serving young children traumatized at early ages strengthens our conviction that those in HHS and in the Justice Department, who have been given the responsibility for the tasks required in the resolution of this present crisis, need and deserve adequate education and training to help them be child-trauma informed. Specifics of the necessary training are well known in education, social work and mental health circles.  It is critical that the expertise of these professionals be accessed and utilized in the implementation of processes, regulations and services to be provided. We strongly urge these federal agencies to begin that education and training immediately.  

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