child brain

How Does Parental Separation Affect a Child’s Brain?

In June 2018, medical and scientific associations including the Society for Neuroscience, the American Psychological Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Physicians, the American Psychiatric Association, among others, urged the U.S. government to halt the practice of separating immigrant children from their parents at the U.S. border. In doing so, these medical and scientific experts focused not on an abstract concept such as cruelty, but on the long-lasting damage that separation can do to a child’s developing brain. The U.S. government rescinded the practice on June 21, 2018.

The incident, however, raised questions about how stress and trauma affect the developing brain. To understand more, BrainFacts.org spoke with Charles A. Nelson, a professor of pediatrics and neuroscience at Harvard Medical School. Nelson, with his colleagues Charley Zeanah and Nathan Fox, studied children from Romania who had been abandoned by their parents and put in state-run institutions. Nelson and his colleagues randomly assigned half of the children to a foster care situation and then followed the children for almost 18 years. They have found changes in the brains of abandoned children that can be permanent.