One Small Voice: Pay attention to the cries of children

by Lynn Mandaville

I’d like you to close your eyes and travel back in time to about 1960.

Imagine, if you will, a 10-year-old girl. She is a Brownie Scout. Though her parents aren’t well off, they have pulled together the money to send her away to Camp Mohawk for a week with other Brownies in the Catskill Mountains of New York.

It’s not really that far away. Maybe an hour at most. Close enough, really, to be reunited if need be.

It’s her very first time separated from her parents and sisters. An adventure!

For a week she will live in a tent with seven other little girls and one teenage counselor. Each girl has a comfortable cot, with linens and an old Army blanket from home. Her own pillow. Enough clean clothes for the week.

Phone calls will not be allowed, but the girls will be encouraged to write home, and letters from home will be permitted.

There will be organized games and activities all day long. Three fine meals a day will be served in a common dining hall where the fun and games continue.  

There is a clean, clear lake for swimming and canoeing. The trees are mature and the setting idyllic.

For the first day there is so much going on there is no time to think about anything but the moment. By nightfall, the girls are exhausted and sleep deep and hard.

But by the second night, some of the girls, those who have never been apart from their parents, are beginning to show signs of distress. They are homesick. And at bedtime they begin to cry.

If you’ve ever spent time with groups of children of any age you know that this type of behavior can be contagious. And at this camp, whole tents of girls are beginning to cry out for their moms and dads. It’s not easy to quell this group reaction. It feeds on itself, takes on a life of its own.

I remember this night like it was yesterday.

The sense of panic, of helplessness, of utter abandonment.

And I was at a place to which I had begged to go! I had awaited this adventure with every fiber of my 10-year-old self. I had come here willingly and said a cheery “See you in a week!” to my mom and dad.

Now I was a puddle of grief and despair.

This was a normal part of growing up white in America in the 1960s. A rite of passage, if you will, where you experienced the controlled trauma of separation from your family in a safe setting with compassionate adults in a proper ratio of children to grownups. Food, clothing and shelter of a high standard were there. Lots of entertainment, activities and learning experiences were included in the experience of leaving home for the first time. And the timeline was finite. Kids knew exactly when they would see their parents again and return to the normalcy of middle-class suburbia.

Now I’d like you to imagine a 10-year-old girl who has made a tortuous journey with her family across mountains or deserts or both, with food uncertain and shelter questionable. She and her loved ones have reached their destination, one filled with hope of a better future than the life they left behind.

But she is separated from her parents without ceremony. No “see you in a week.” No hope for a letter or post card from mom or dad.

She is placed in a chain-link cage with a dozen or more children, a yoga mat for a bed and an aluminum tarp for a blanket. If reports are correct, there will be a handful of social worker types for the dozens of children on the verge of panic and terror.  

There are no games or organized activities to engage the kids.

The food will be institutional, prepared in huge quantities. It will not be familiar food.  It will be American processed food.  (But she won’t feel like eating anyway.)

There are no mature trees. No idyllic mountain setting with a clear, clean lake.

There will be chaos, and panic and crying. And no comfort.

This is not a normal, childhood rite of passage. This is child abuse and cruelty of the worst kind.

If I thought homesickness at Brownie camp was awful, I can only pretend to imagine the deep-seated trauma being visited upon these children!

I don’t know if you were able to put yourself in the skin of a 10-year-old girl, American or immigrant. But I’d implore you to try. If you can’t get in that skin, imagine your own child or grandchild subjected to this same mental, emotional cruelty, day after day, while an impotent government argues over your fate.

We can argue about “catch and release,” chain migration, a “great wall,” and total immigration overhaul later.

The crisis to children is NOW.

It can be fixed. EASILY. It must be fixed. POST HASTE. And anyone in government who fails to listen to the outcry of the American public, or the wailing of the children, should be out of a job as soon as possible.

Party be damned. We must not toy with the fragile psyches of innocent children.