KQED News Mind/Shift – Caroline Preston
“At the start of World War II, millions of children were evacuated from London and other cities and sent to live with foster parents in the English countryside. What happened to these children became a subject of study for psychoanalyst Anna Freud, who wrote in a 1943 book that young people who remained with their families through the bombing “were much less upset” than those who were sent away. Her contemporary John Bowlby studied children who spent extended stays in hospitals, apart from their families. The research helped inform his influential “attachment theory,” which emphasizes the bond between parent and child and the harms that come from separating them. Those studies are part of a large body of research on what happens when kids are separated from their parents. But what about the situation unfolding now, as the coronavirus quarantine isolates children not from their primary caregivers but from their peers, teachers and everyone else in their lives?” (more)