"Throughout the world, wars, natural disasters, institutionalization, child-trafficking, and historic rates of domestic and international migration are splitting up millions of families," says this article from PBS News Hour. "For the children involved, the harm of separation is well-documented." The article features an interview with Hirokazu Yoshikawa, a developmental psychologist at New York University who codirects NYU’s Global TIES for Children, in which he speaks about the research that he and his colleagues have conducted into the impacts of parent-child separation and the efficacy of programs meant to help heal the damage.
Yoshikawa refers to previous research on attachment as well as the studies on Romanian children who grew up in institutions. "There are now about 8 million children in the world living in institutional care," says Yoshikawa. "This is a problem that reflects the lack of robust foster care and capacity of governments to facilitate placement with relatives, who will generally give more stable care than strangers. As we state in our review, even in otherwise good-quality institutional care, children suffer due to the high turnover of caregivers."