In recent years, within the framework of globalization, we have been seeing more and more cases of immigrant minors who come and go from their countries of origin to the host countries, suffering a great psychological breakdown.
I am not referring to the case of regular family reunification, a topic that is already very difficult from a psychological point of view, because the reunion between a child and his parents after years of being separated is a process that generates a lot of psychological tension, but I want to raise the case of many minors, who go through the process of joining and separating from their parents more than once. These boys and girls, when they have been reunited with their parents, with all the emotional difficulties that this entails, are forced to separate from them again and return to their country of origin, for family reasons, because living conditions here They are difficult, because their parents consider that the values that are transmitted in our society do not seem appropriate to them, etc. It is not uncommon that, if circumstances change, after a while, they come back here again.
As is understandable, from a psychological point of view, the consequences of these comings and goings are tremendous. These minors usually have great difficulties establishing minimally stable affective ties: when they begin to become emotionally close to someone, they are separated thousands of kilometers, the attachment breaks. And if there is any concept in which the innumerable schools of psychology and current psychiatry agree, it is in this concept of attachment, an instinct for affective bonding, essential for psychological structuring, which was raised in the 1960s by the psychiatrist Scotsman John Bowlby.
Of course, we must also review all the problems of a linguistic, cultural, school type, etc. that so many changes entail.
It is very painful to hear in consultations: “Doctor, my son hates me!” I have seen mothers crying uncontrollably while their children laughed and made fun of them to their own faces. A child who feels abandoned can be just as cruel as a spurned lover. Unfortunately, these boys and girls do not understand the reasons that have led their parents, believing that they were doing it for their own good, to bring them and take them away, to separate them, nor the suffering that these separations entail for the parents themselves.
There is very little attention in society for the fate of these minors. There are hardly any national and international institutions that look after them, as is generally the case with attention to immigrants. Is it so difficult to talk to parents and help them understand the emotional consequences of these separations? Is it so difficult to establish a program to find out which children are marching and where they are going and what will become of them when they change countries? With the technologies we have, it doesn’t seem like it. From the Atenea Network, a global network to help immigrants, http://laredatenea.com we offer to launch initiatives in this line with people and institutions that want to participate.
These boys and girls from nowhere experience extreme grief, they are not sick, but depending on their vulnerability, the psychological limitations they have, they may end up suffering from serious psychological problems, due to their significant difficulties in establishing bonds. We have seen children who, despite their suffering, although with difficulties, are able to restructure their ties with their parents, but many others find it very difficult and this suffering ends up taking its toll on a psychological level.
People are not objects or merchandise, we are not containers that travel from one country to another, from one continent to another, as the dominant social model would have us believe. People need stable affective environments to feel good, not to mention in the case of minors who also need them to grow and mature. In a very dehumanized world it seems that this has been lost sight of. The least that can be asked, as long as we do not manage to change this reality, is that at least, if human beings are going to be treated as containers, that they put the “fragile” label.
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