By Kathleen Kernicky. Sun-Sentinel.Web-posted: 12:15 a.m. Jan. 6, 2000
No matter where Elián González grows up, or who raises him, the 6-year-old will carry a heavy burden from the death of his mother, the tug-of-war splitting his family and the turmoil, upheaval and confusion that now shadows his life.
"No matter what happens, this is going to have a tremendous impact on his life," said M. Gary Neuman, a Miami Beach psychotherapist who treats children experiencing separation and divorce. Neuman thinks Elián needs time and privacy and the support of relatives while he
mourns the death of his mother, a death he witnessed.
"He has a heavy burden. Children don't want their tragedy, their pain to be plastered all over the newspaper and to cause an entire community to battle over it. It almost forces him to become more confused about whether he is allowed to mourn, whether he is allowed to cry, to fall apart,
to feel joy.
"It is almost as though he has thousands and thousands of people looking to him for something, when he is just a little kid looking to everyone else."
In Elián's case, grief has been compounded by the separation from his father and grandparents, the constant glare of media attention and the community commotion that has engulfed his life.
Although he went to school on Wednesday, Elián was beginning to sense that things might soon change, a family member said. The family has not told Elián of the federal government's decision. "He doesn't know what is going on. We don't want to make him feel bad," said
Marisleysis González, 21, the cousin so often seen hand-in-hand with Elián in Miami.
Tearful and distraught, Marisleysis González said she knew she might have to "sit down with him and explain if worse comes to worse. This will be very hard for him psychologically."
For now, the family is trying to protect him from the commotion surrounding his fate. Outside his home, hundreds of Cuban-Americans protested the decision to return him to Cuba. Family members kept him away from the house on Wednesday, hustling him from school to an undisclosed location.
"(The media attention and the commotion in the community) can't help but exaggerate his sense of responsibility and the feeling that he is responsible for it all," said David John Berndt, a clinical psychologist and expert in separation and custody issues in Washington, D.C. "Without
help, it is going to be absolutely hard for him to lose a parent and go through this entire experience. It has already dragged on too long. He has had more than enough changes as it is."
The biggest threat to Elián's emotional health could be his own misplaced sense of guilt over everything that has happened, psychologists said.
"Young children personalize most everything," Neuman said. "To some extent, they may feel that mom left me, or dad left me because I was not good enough. There is a very deep-seated sadness to these children. It leaves a child feeling unprotected and potentially very
distrustful of the world itself. A child could grow up and quite literally not feel safe in his own skin."
Such children might face behavior problems, difficulty at school, poor social adjustment and an inability to form close relationships, Berndt said. That can result in depression, nightmares and regression to bed-wetting and temper tantrums.
"One of the buffers to such a loss is to have another family, particularly an extended family," Berndt said.
In Elián's case, "the father and grandparents would be the logical and most effective buffer, although it is possible that the new family also could provide that. But that is more of an unknown."
But if he were to stay in South Florida, experts said the death of his mother would be compounded by the separation from his father and grandparents.
Studies have shown that children who grow up without a father are at greater risk of failing at school and enduring emotional or behavioral problems, said Wade Horn, a clinical psychologist and president of the National Fatherhood Initiative outside Washington, D.C. A 6-year-old boy is "beginning
to shift their identification from the mother to the father. They're beginning to look at, what is manhood all about? If there is a disruption there, it can cause problems later on with issues of identity and gender role."
Juan Clark, a sociology professor at Miami-Dade Community College and a Cuban-American, described a different kind of risk for Elián or any child growing up in Cuba. Milk rations, poor nutrition and housing, communist indoctrination and schools in the countryside where teenagers are
sent to live and work in agriculture.
How does that measure against a life of abundance in the United States, a life of separation from his father and four grandparents?
"That's anyone guess," Clark said. "To weigh one against the other is very difficult. Can the love and care of the father and grandparents make up for that? I don't know."
Staff Writer Luisa Yanez contributed to this report.
Kathleen Kernicky can be reached at kkernicky@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4725. |