The Hidden Damage of Family Separation - Wendy B. Smith, PH.D., LCSW

By Dr. Wendy Smith | Broken family attachments have a long half-life.

PSYCHOLOGY TODAY (Dr. Wendy Smith) – September 15, 2025

KEY POINTS

Early attachment relationship(s) ensure protection and provide the context for future development.
Sudden and prolonged separation from the primary attachment figure constitutes a trauma for children.
Family separation can lead to a dysregulated response to stress and difficulty forming new relationships.

The separation of young children from their parents happens for many reasons, including death, divorce, incarceration, natural disasters, and immigration policy. The circumstances that disrupt or sever the attachment may differ, but the potential for lasting wounds is almost always present. As a society, we underestimate the way disrupted attachments can undermine a child’s sense of self and affect their future relationships.

Children’s early attachment to their primary caregiver(s) ensures their survival and physical health and is the context of neurobiological development and mental health. Ideally, the attachment relationship provides three protective factors to the baby: the learning of empathy, the control and balance of feelings, especially destructive ones, and the development of cognitive capacities.

At the same time, the development of the brain and the child are also inextricably linked to environmental opportunities and dangers. The continuing presence of important relationships is what mediates the environment, providing safety and coping skills.

A sudden and prolonged separation has an incalculable impact on a child. Events that exceed our ability to cope cause unmanageable stress. The younger the children are, the less equipped they are to cope with stress on their own. The comfort and sense of safety that a trusted parent can provide is a critical buffer against the negative effects of stress. An abrupt, lasting separation from a parent constitutes extreme stress; an extra wallop comes from the fact that the very person the child would usually turn to for comfort is gone.

Prolonged exposure to stress in the absence of a protective relationship causes the human stress response system to remain activated, preventing recovery and compromising the child’s ability to regain the sense of safety necessary to move forward in life. Anxiety and depression can arise as children lose hope for reunion with their absent loved one. It becomes hard to trust others and to engage freely in other relationships.

Negative outcomes of disrupted attachments result from family separation policies, and they also appear in the lives of children who experience foster care and those in the juvenile justice system. Many former juvenile offenders whose stories are told in my book, Before Their Crimes: What We’re Misunderstanding About Childhood Trauma, Youth Crime, and the Path to Healing, lost a primary attachment figure early on. In most of their lives, these disruptions went unaddressed. Trang, whom I interviewed when he was 44 years old and was recently released after 26 years in prison, offers a poignant example of what it feels like when your family is torn apart. (His comments below are edited and condensed.)

The fourth of six children, he was born in the aftermath of the Vietnam War on an island east of Saigon, where his parents were farmers. The post-war years in Vietnam were chaotic and harsh, a struggle to find food in a devastated landscape. The family was anxious to leave; Trang’s father was assigned by the South Vietnamese government to be an armed monitor as the communists had not yet taken over the island, an assignment he did not want, but could not refuse. He did not believe in the South Vietnamese cause and mistrusted their motives. Soon after his assignment, he and Trang’s uncle and older brother found a way to leave the island.

Trang said:

“I was two when my parents and my sisters left. They felt if we don’t do it now, things might change to where we can’t. They knew that if we try, and it doesn’t work out, we can get caught, or killed, or imprisoned.

Ultimately, they escaped, and I was alone with my grandparents. I have vivid memories of everything, little snapshots in my mind of feeling alone and nobody being there except my grandparents. It was a deep sense of isolation, of being alone. I learned later that my mother and my sisters were on the mainland, preparing to leave. They couldn’t all go at once, or it would make people suspicious.

It seemed like I was apart from my mother all of my life. Probably I was apart from her for some months, but it seemed like my whole life. When I saw her again, I don’t remember feeling any full emotions. The picture I have of my childhood is empty rooms, being by myself.”

The months without his mother felt like forever to Trang. The pain of being apart from the person to whom you are most attached transforms time, stretching it unbearably so that it seems endless. The separation began in Trang’s second year, when brain development is not far enough along to allow a baby to make sense of what is happening or to contain it without help.

The hurt would have overwhelmed his infant capabilities. His grandparents, for reasons of culture, personality, or their own distress, were unable to offer the connection and comfort he needed. Trang’s way to manage the painful emptiness was to shut down emotionally. When at last he saw his mother again, many months later, there was no relief or joy—he could not feel anything.

“When I finally met up with my dad, I felt like he and my brother and my uncle had a bond that I wasn’t part of. I always felt like an outsider.”

There was no sense of homecoming with his father, either. The departures of his parents ruptured his early connections with them. He could not bridge the distance that was not only physical but psychological—even though it was temporary. He was too young (and too traumatized) to have the tools to reconnect without their help; they were preoccupied with the flight from Vietnam, accomplishing a safe departure and resettlement in a new country. There was no secure base for him, and no chance to heal the losses he carried inside.

As an adolescent, Trang’s unmet longing for connection led him to join a gang and, ultimately, to face two life sentences for his presence at a home invasion where a police officer was shot.

The effects of broken attachments live on after the separation has happened. Some children are lucky enough to have someone else to help them weather the loss, but some, like Trang, are not. Some separations are unavoidable. The knowledge of the profound negative impact of such events on children should lead us to avoid every unnecessary family separation.

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