Sunday, April 23, 2000
Elian's burden: the prior traumas
Experts say raid is relatively minor
BY Tim Bonfield, The Cincinnati Enquirer
and The Associated Press
Whether young Elian Gonzalez will grow up to be a normal, stable man or a person with a scarred personality remains impossible to predict.
But many experts in child psychology say the key forces shaping the Cuban boy's future probably will not include the memory of heavily armed U.S. Marshals in Miami bashing through the door Saturday.
Instead, the pre-dawn raid becomes just one more experience in a five-month odyssey that includes losing his mother at sea, enduring a bitter custody fight, living in a media fishbowl and seeing himself become a pawn in a high-profile political game.
“This is a boy whose mother is dead. That's a lifelong trauma,” said Dr. Henry Grunebaum, a family psychiatrist who teaches at Harvard Medical School.
“Then, rather than being returned to his father and the people he knows, he's with people he basically doesn't know. Then, they get him to make a videotape where he's asked to state his disloyalty to people he's been with all his life.”
Given all that, the brutality of his departure was “a sort of small event in the life of this boy,” Dr. Grunebaum said.
Allen Daniels, a clinical social worker with University of Cincinnati Psychiatric Services, said, “It's hard to think of all this in terms of any one event. He has been through a series of traumas in the past several months. He must think this is one of the most bizarre countries in the world.”
On one hand, Elian has been through a lot for a 6-year-old boy. Then again, so have the children of Bosnia, or any child who suddenly lost a parent, or any child who got tossed around during an ugly divorce.
How well children endure stressful situations depends partly on how quickly they can return to a stable life and partly on the child's basic personality.
“Kids can be remarkably resilient. But kids differ dra matically in their resiliency,” said Dr. Susan Rosenthal, a pediatric psychologist at Children's Hospital Medical Center. “It depends on your personal characteristics, your social support and your understanding of the events that occurred.”
Fact is, the public simply doesn't have enough facts about Elian to predict how things will likely turn out, Dr. Rosenthal said. Not much is known about how the boy grew up in Cuba, Elian's personality, nor his understanding of the events happening around him.
He will be affected. He will have memories. But to assume Elian will be shaped in a negative way by all these experiences is too simplistic, Dr. Rosenthal said.
Like other experts, Dr. Howard Weiner, a child psychiatrist in Ann Arbor, Mich., emphasized he had not had an opportunity to examine Elian.
But stressful events can trigger a variety of responses in children. Short-term, a child might suffer nightmares, learning problems, and regressions such as bed wetting. Longer-term, a child might face anxiety, depression, and difficulty trusting people.
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