The Bonds We Break: When the Science of Attachment Becomes a Weapon

We say attachment matters until it threatens the system’s agenda. Then, the very science meant to protect children becomes a weapon used to justify their separation. This is how the system uses professionals who claim to care about bonding and attachment to justify the separation of Black children from their families.

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I used to believe newborns were too young to care. Too young to remember. Too young to be affected by separation.

That belief shattered the day I walked into a session on infant mental health. I entered skeptical and walked out with my world turned upside down.

The science was clear and sobering: babies are not blank slates. They arrive already connected. Decades of research prove it.

• Babies know their mother’s voice in utero. A landmark 1980 study by Anthony DeCasper and William Fifer found that newborns prefer their mother’s voice over a stranger’s, even within hours of birth. Later studies confirmed that recognition begins before birth, as fetuses respond differently to their mother’s voice than to other voices.

• They are tuned to the rhythm of her heartbeat. That steady sound becomes a regulating anchor. Infants exposed to it after birth show reduced crying and greater calm.

• They even recognize siblings. Research shows that fetuses exposed repeatedly to a sibling’s voice in utero later respond with familiarity and preference to that voice after birth. What adults might dismiss as background noise is, for a developing baby, part of the soundscape of belonging. I remember when my nephew smiled at his 2-year-old sister just days after coming home from the hospital. I said, “It’s true! Babies do know their siblings.”

  
  

What I learned was devastating: the single most traumatic thing we can do to a newborn is to sever those bonds at birth, taking them from the only voices, rhythms, and relationships they have ever known.

The science is undeniable. Early disruption of attachment scars children.

And yet, the child welfare system does it every single day.

In my county, when you look at removals by age group (0–5, 6–12, and 13–17), the largest share falls within the 0–5 bracket. And within that group, most are infants under the age of one. We know separation is trauma. We know stability with family is protective. Yet we choose, systematically and repeatedly, to inflict harm anyway.

When conducting risk assessments, the system often flags infants as vulnerable because they are nonverbal and unable to protect themselves. But it fails to account for the very real risk created by severing the bond with a primary caregiver during these critical windows of development.

With everything we know about bonding and attachment, the system should be less likely, not more likely, to remove babies. Because breaking that first bond has lifelong consequences.

And here’s where the hypocrisy is undeniable.

When children were separated at the border, several professional organizations raised their voices in unison: separation from parents, even for a short time, causes lasting and devastating harm. They were right.

But where are those voices when Black children are separated every single day in the name of child welfare? Where is the outrage when state-sanctioned removals rip infants and toddlers from their families in our own communities? The trauma is the same. The grief is the same. The lifelong wounds are the same. And yet, the silence is deafening.

The science does not change depending on who the child is or where the separation happens. What changes is who society believes deserves protection and who it decides can be commodified.

The system cherishes bonding when it benefits white families, and discards it when Black families fight to stay together.

When white foster parents want to adopt, bonding assessments flood in. Experts appear overnight, armed with reports declaring that the child has “bonded” and that removal would cause irreparable harm.

But where were these experts when the bond between that same child and their parent was first shattered? It doesn’t matter how old a child is when separated from a foster parent. They were younger still when they were taken from their birth parent. That first bond, the one formed by God, was never protected.

And when children are finally allowed to return home, the system becomes meticulous about “transition plans” slowly easing the child away from the foster home to protect that attachment. Once again, the feelings of the foster parent outweigh the sacred bond of birth.

It exposes the hypocrisy at the heart of this system: attachment only matters when it protects white comfort, not Black connection.

My son spent four of the most critical years for attachment with his foster mother. And then, just like that, he was matched with me. She was the other mother figure he knew. The one who filled the space the system created. Now he’s learning how to trust that this new mother isn’t temporary. How to attach again after four years of living with someone who stood in the place of the one he was born to. His transition proved just how arbitrary these so-called values are.

The system claims to protect children from their parents. But who is protecting our families from the system? Children are being ripped from their parents during the most critical time of bonding and attachment. The system destroys these bonds with free rein and no accountability. It takes children from Black parents who lack financial support and places them with white strangers who are then paid to raise those same children until they turn eighteen.

The system has never been about children. It’s always been about who children belong to.

Florida even codified this truth into law, requiring courts to approve any decision to move a child from a foster home if the child had lived there for six months and the foster parents had filed an adoption application.  Administrators went so far as to compare removing a child from foster parents to a “death.”

But where is that same energy for birth parents? For the mother whose voice and heartbeat her baby already knew before birth? For the father who never even got the chance to bond before the system intervened?

We say attachment matters, but only when it serves the system’s agenda.

Because every creature in nature is raised among its own, except Black children in this system. When it comes to Black children, we suspend the laws of nature and call it “rescue.” Lions don’t give their cubs to hyenas. Yet somehow, we have convinced ourselves that tearing Black children from their families and placing them with white strangers is salvation.

White saviorism robs children of cultural identity and ancestral belonging. It replaces family with “placement,” and calls loss love.

Psalm 68:6 says, “God sets the lonely in families.” Not strangers. Not saviors. Not systems.

And yet, in a country that stamps “In God We Trust” on its currency, we tell Him He got it wrong when He gives children to their parents. If we can’t support what God has ordained, we should leave it alone. What gives our government the moral authority to rewrite what God has designed?

Scripture says that children are a gift from the Lord, not from the State. If we truly believe that, then our responsibility is simple: support the parents He chose, and stop destroying the families He created.

So here is the question we must each answer: Do we really trust God?

Because if we did, we would trust the order He established. We would believe that the same God who forms children in their mother’s womb also chose the family they were born into. We would not replace His design with state control and call it protection.

This narrative that government must rescue children from the very parents God gave them is a lie straight from the pit of hell. It is not of God. It is the arrogance of a system that believes it knows better than the Creator Himself.

If we truly trusted God, we would stop worshiping government intervention as salvation. We would stop funding separation and start funding support.

We would stop confusing punishment for protection.

We would stand up and say: ENOUGH

If we claim to trust God, then we must trust what He ordains and that means defending the families He created, not destroying them.