How do we explain ICE to our children? | Opinion
Karen Levine Egee, Ph.D., is a retired child psychologist living in Brunswick.
As a child psychologist, I spent my career helping young children make sense of life’s toughest realities. Natural disasters. Accidents. Serious illnesses. Divorce. Death. There are ways of talking with children about such things that honor both the truth and their developing understanding.
But this? I don’t know how to explain this….
I talk first with Amal’s mother (not her real name), who has asked for help because Amal, age 6, and her 2-year-old sister have been distraught ever since their father was taken by ICE. They cry at length in the morning because their father was the one who made them breakfast and at bedtime because he was the one who tucked them in.
She tells me that Amal woke up that night, the terrible night he was taken. She heard her parents calling back and forth to each other from their apartment to the street below. She got out of bed and looked out the window. There, she told her mother, she saw her father on the sidewalk crying, surrounded by strange men. She saw him forced into a car and driven away.
Her mother tried to protect her, trying to turn the trauma into a palatable story. “Those are just friends of his,” she said. “He is going with them to do paperwork.”
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But a 6-year-old puts the pieces together.
Amal looked at her mother and said, “No, those are NOT his friends. I have never seen them before. I KNOW his friends. And he was CRYING. I saw him crying! Those guys TOOK him. I saw them push him into a white car. Our car is black.”
The mother’s instinct to relabel the horror reminded me of the film “Life is Beautiful,” in which a father uses his boundless imagination to try to shield his young son from the horrors of the concentration camp they are in by pretending it’s all an elaborate game. But except in movies, illusions like these fall apart quickly.
I explain to the mother that our aim is to tell children a version of the truth that matches in some respects what they saw — so they don’t question their own eyes. Because Amal clearly saw her father taken against his will, we have to find a way to help her make sense of this.
As I launch into this clinical explanation, using the same trusted psychological templates I have relied on for decades, I assume we will easily develop an explanation together. But instead, as the mother and I think aloud together, my templates shatter.
“I don’t want to tell her Daddy did something wrong,” the mother says. “He did not. He is a good man.”
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“No, of course not,” I answer.
“And I don’t want to tell her it is because of the color of his skin. We teach our children that all people are special. That the color of skin does not matter.”
I search my mind for a logical, clinical explanation and find … absolutely nothing. If we tell Amal her daddy will be treated fairly, or that this couldn’t happen to her mother, or that we know he will be fine and safe and home soon, we would be lying.
And when a child shakes her head and cries, “They shouldn’t do that!,” she is expressing a
fundamental human truth that our legal system is forgetting.
So as a psychologist, I am out of explanatory templates. Full stop.
When the immigration policies of a nation allow federal agents to drag a crying father away in the dark, they leave children behind whose sense of joy and safety are permanently broken. How can anyone hope to heal traumas like these until we fix the system that inflicts them?
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