Parenting as violence erupts around the corner

My friend Rebekkah, a child therapist and descendant of survivors of pogroms, agrees. “I feel sickened,” she writes.

Here we were, a child therapist and a professor, both mothers of small children, trying to digest the disturbing news of climate change, detention centers and mass shootings. The event we fixed on was not the incomprehensible gun violence in El Paso, but one connected by the drama of immigration, which transpired over a year ago at one of the Texas border detention centers: the death of Mariee Juárez, who was 18 months old, barely able to walk. In detention she slept on a concrete floor, was often refused care by doctors and ultimately lost 8% of her body weight. Finally, after her family was released to be with relatives on the East Coast she succumbed to a hemorrhage that led to irreversible brain and organ damage in May 2018.

My own child is young enough that I remember her cries through the night. The question of whether I raced to comfort her quickly enough can leave me sleepless for hours, as surely it left Yazmin, Mariee’s mother, as well. Yet the detention of small children ripped from their parents has not stopped. Again, I think: I am raising my child in a time of monsters.

Rebekkah stewards a podcast that translates the findings of modern neuroscience. Her episodes ask: does science tell us how to raise children who aren’t paranoid or riddled with self-doubt?

The children in Dilley have been exposed to conditions that science tells us may portend an inhuman disregard for the life of others: not because of their parents, but because of the actions of the U.S. state acting in concert with a conservative immigration policy.

Folks who juggle careers and small children typically have little political or economic power to help children detained at the border. But there are effective tools. Perhaps the smartest example is a map of detention centers and allied institutions gathered by a group of volunteers that includes another friend, Alex Gil, a librarian at Columbia University. Alex’s map shows a kind of labor that almost any of us can emulate and support – collecting data, documenting the event – and building resilience networks to support those abused children.

Working toward a less violent community can be as simple as sharing information, or shifting the messages of a podcast or a blog to deal with violence, the future, and the world we want for our children. For those that have resources to share, there are more opportunities to plug in. The map of allied institutions lists resources for survivors of the detention centers.

Money helps many support agencies do their work, but time, effort, housing, and ingenuity are needed, too. The map means that any small community with resources can connect with a larger network: thus Rebekka’s circuit of child therapists who want to help, her podcast, or the local preschool with extra places, the church with extra housing for those in need, the pediatrician’s office with hours to volunteer, the thrift store with clothing in small sizes, the law firm willing to offer pro-bono counseling – all can list themselves as resources and connect.

Rebekka says she is working on a parenting podcast episode that will engage what it’s like to parent in a time when other children are being mistreated, how we raise children to be healthy citizens of the world, and how parents can challenge the violence around us.

Parents need to talk about why we value raising curious, open-hearted children who can think for themselves, question us, stand up for themselves – and plot ways of reestablishing justice.

Let’s give our children a chance to remember that their parents wanted for them a less violent world.

Guldi is a professor at Southern Methodist University and a mother of a three-year-old.