Cruelty at the Border: Separating Children From Parents

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/25/opinion/immigrants-border-children.html

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To the Editor:

Re “Over 700 Children Taken From Parents at Border” (front page, April 21):

The Department of Homeland Security’s practice of removing children from their parents upon crossing our borders is nothing short of horrifying. It is hard to imagine the mind-set that would sanction and pursue such a cruel and psychologically misguided policy.

Children are dependent on their parents to help them manage and make sense of their world and deal with childhood anxieties. It would be terrifying for both the child and the parent to be abruptly separated from each other. Many prominent psychologists have written about the critical importance of this early dependent relationship and how disrupting it can seriously impair the child’s ability to develop into a healthy, well-functioning person.

Failures in this area speak to a failure in our humanity. And they will inevitably give rise to a generation of individuals with severe psychological damage, which they will bring to the societies in which they live.

JUDITH FELTON, NEW YORK

The writer is a psychoanalyst and president of the Contemporary Freudian Society.