Foreword

Dr. Bruce Perry, MD, PhD Principal of The Neurosequential Network, Renowned Trauma and Brain Expert

Like all species on Earth, we have evolved unique genetic capabilities that have allowed us to survive and thrive over thousands of generations. At the heart of these ‘gifts’ is our connectedness –our bonds with others make us part of a greater whole. For 250,000 years humans lived in small, developmentally heterogeneous groups. In these 20-60 member ‘clans’ the elderly, adults, youth, child, toddler and infant lived in close physical proximity. Physical, emotional and social interactions were dense and continuous. Caregiving ratios for children under three were 4:1 not the ‘enriched’ 1:4 ratio that today’s childcare settings brag about (1/16th the relational density of our ancestral child rearing environments). We are a social species; each of us is fundamentally interdependent upon many others – past and present, known and unknown. This foundational capacity to form and maintain relationships – to communicate, commune, couple and create with others – is responsible for the survival of every human being alive today – and every human being who has ever lived. It is no surprise then, that the complex and diverse capacities to manage stress in the individual body are intertwined with the complex and diverse systems involved in connecting with others. Connectedness, stress regulation, and health in all domains – physical, emotional, social and cognitive - are intertwined.

Another ‘gift’ of our species is the capacity of the human cortex to absorb and store remarkable volumes of information per second – and then make that ‘information’ available for ongoing analysis, processing, revisiting, revising and inventing. This is what has allowed us – over thousands of generations – to discover, invent and change the ways we live and live together. Innovations in cultivation, domestication of animals, communication, transportation, and complex social structures and so much more have resulted in our modern world. This process of sociocultural evolution has dominated human history for the last 20,000 years. As our social structures have become larger and more complex, we have codified practices, created programs, defined policy and law to guide us through the inevitable set of problems resulting from this inventing process. Each generation has the task of problem-solving about the issues created by the choices of previous generations. Well-intended changes in systems, or practice, or policy often cause new problems. The un-ending process of creating a future will always involve review and reflection on the choices of previous problem solvers – and making tweaks, addendum, additions, subtractions to better meet the current needs and interests of a population. This ongoing inventing process is complicated by the rapid rate of changes in the world – and in the ‘inventing’ process that has accelerated dramatically in the last 100 years. The rate of creating innovations is faster than our problem-solving processes.

One of the most significant consequences of this rapid ‘modernization’ has been the relative ignorance and neglect of one of the fundamental needs and strengths of humans – to belong. Being connected to and actively engaged with others in your ‘clan’ confers physiological, emotional and social buffering from present stressors and an opportunity to heal from previous adversities. Belonging helps make you healthy, helps keep you healthy and helps you heal. Yet so many of our innovations and advances actually fragment our social connectedness (e.g., increasing screen time) in subtle but powerful ways. And many of our other innovations and policies INTENTIONALLY fragment family, community and culture. The objective of colonizing practices, i.e., ‘civilizing,’ ‘pacifying,’ ‘modernizing’, were to undermine family, community and cultural bonds to facilitate the introduction of ‘other’ ways of being, thinking and living (usually only giving partial access and privilege to these ‘new ways’, thereby keeping the colonized at the bottom of a transgenerational power differential intended to maintain the power and wealth of the colonizers). In many ways, our current social systems retain the fundamentally colonizing/feudal features that are endemic to large hierarchical systems. It should be no surprise that Aboriginal children and youth are over-represented in Australia’s child welfare and juvenile justice system (Atkinson & Atkinson, 2007) or that First Nations children and families are most fragmented by current social policies and systems in Canada, or that the transgenerational impact of slavery and ongoing intentional disenfranchisement and marginalization of enslaved peoples results in the overrepresentation in our ‘modern’ child welfare system. Only with an awareness of these features can we – the current generation of problem solvers and inventors – adequately address and remedy these shortcomings.

This issue of the Family Justice Journal is all about that process. A group of innovative scholars and leaders are writing about the catastrophic impact of fracturing these connections. The long-standing policies of child welfare to remove children from parent, family, community and culture have only exacerbated the problems they were intended to remedy. These scholars give us hope and direction by these reflections.

My journey in this area started over thirty years ago when I was asked to evaluate a 14-year-old girl who was being ‘hospitalized’, i.e., imprisoned, for ‘conduct disorder.’ Briefly, at age 13 she had disclosed sexual abuse by her step-father to a teacher. The resulting CPS investigation resulted in her removal from the home (they kept her 12-year-old sister in the home). Prior this, she had been a good student, part of a church youth group, an active and successful athlete in soccer and softball, regularly visited her grandparents who lived in her neighborhood – and had never had behavioral, emotional, social or academic problems. After removal she was put in foster care in a completely different part of the city – away from school, friends, teammates, family. She would run back to her community and stay with friends. Again, and again. She started to fail in school, ‘disrespect’ her foster family, and became very sad. The legal proceedings dragged on – each time she ran away she had more restrictions. She became angrier and sadder and more isolated. Finally, she required ‘hospitalization’ to prevent her from running away. I met her, found nothing wrong with her aside from a normal set of feelings, thoughts and behaviors given the situation. I will never forget her statement – “Why am I the one who has to get punished when he is the one who hurt me? He keeps his bed, his house, his job, his friends and I am the one who loses everything. It’s not fair.” And I would add…it’s not moral, it’s not just, it’s not effective and “our” interventions just hurt her. For the next thirty years I saw hundreds of similar examples of iatrogenic problems –physiological, social, emotional and behavioral –caused by the very interventions in child welfare, education and mental health – that were supposed to be helping children and families. At the core of all these misguided interventions is a fundamental ignorance about basics of human development, the principles of brain organization and functioning, the importance of stress response malleability and flexibility, the power of early childhood experiences and the importance of connectedness.

The high malleability – therefore, the high vulnerability – of the infant and young child is of particular importance in child welfare. Separation from family is most devastating when children are young; In 2021, 203,770 children entered foster care in the US. Children ages one to five are 29 % of these. Over 2021 391,641 children were living in foster care. Of these, 33 % were one to five and 7% were ‘babies.’ (AECF, 2022)

While disruptions of connection for youth are bad; disruptions and separations of primary relational experiences early in childhood are catastrophic. In our work to study the impact of experiences (good and bad) on development (Perry, 2009), the valence of early life relational connection appears to be the most powerful determinant of many mental health outcomes later in life (Hambrick, et al., 2018). We also find that measures related to ‘connectedness’ during development are better predictors of “adversities” despite the current popular over-focus on ‘ACEs” as determinative in health outcomes. In addition, we find again and again that the major predictor of current functioning is the current state of connectedness (Hambrick, Brawner & Perry, 2019). Simply stated, connectedness is at the heart of all human health, creativity, productivity and humanity. And any practice, program or policy that actively disrespects this will increase risk, erode resilience and, ultimately, be a detriment to our progress as a species. The good news is that the importance of social engagement and relational health is emerging in many fields –the Surgeon General has written a book (Murthy, 2020) and recently a major policy paper (Office of the Surgeon General, 2023) about the importance of connectedness, for example.

Sadly, connectedness, community and culture have not been ‘centered’ in our current child welfare programs and practices. This Special Issue has a focus on the enduring, multi-dimensional negative impact that the intentional, systemic efforts of child welfare policy and practice have on the very children, families and communities these systems intend to help. An essential element of learning from the authors in this Special Edition is to acknowledge the limits and biases of our own educational, professional and cultural experiences. It is likely that a ‘defensive’ stance will be elicited when confronted with the harsh reality of the failures of our systems; when using our the ‘best intention’ lens we often minimize or avoid the reality of the overwhelming and sobering negative impacts of our child welfare interventions. I would ask that the reader remember that the best intentions developed and delivered within a patriarchal, colonizing framework are never good for the colonized.

References

AECF (2022) 2022 Kids Count Data Book. Annie E. Casey Foundation (https://assets.aecf.org/m/resourcedoc/aecf2022kidscountdatabook-2022.pdf Office of the

Atkinson, J., & Atkinson, R. (2007). Trauma, transgenerational transfer and healing indigenous people. International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction, 5(3), 274-282.

Hambrick, E.P., Brawner, T. & Perry, B.D. (2019) Timing of early life stress and the development of brain-related capacities. Front. Behav. Neurosci. 13:183. doi: 10.3389/fnbeh.2019.00183

Hambrick, E.P., Brawner, T., Perry, B.D., Brandt, K., Hofeister, C. & Collins, J. (2018) Beyond the ACE Score: Examining relationships between timing of developmental adversity, relational health and developmental outcomes in children Archives of Psychiatric Nursing DOI:10.1016/j. apnu.2018.11.001

Murthy, V. H. (2020) Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World. Harper Wave

Perry, B.D. (2009) Examining child maltreatment through a neurodevelopmental lens: clinical application of the Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics. Journal of Loss and Trauma 14: 240-255,

Surgeon General. (2023). Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Public Health Service, Office of the Surgeon General.