The UC Irvine Initiative to End Family Violence welcomes Professor Ilona S. Yim to discuss "Parent-Child Separation and Health in Adulthood: The Sent-Away Children Study."
In the decades following the second world war, an estimated eight to ten million German children, most between the ages of two and 12 years old, were sent away from their homes to stay in geographically removed “health resorts,” typically for six to twelve weeks at a time. Many of these “sent-away” children, now middle aged and older adults, describe their experiences in these resorts as traumatic. Complete isolation from their families, overly rigid rules, and cruel punishments are commonly narrated in the more than 14,000 publicly available reports by former sent-away children. This presentation will introduce to the experience of the sent-away children and provide initial findings of two empirical studies on the association between early life stress and health in this group.
Ilona Yim, PhD, is a Professor in the Department of Psychological Science at the University of California Irvine. She received her PhD in 2003 from the University of Trier, Germany. Her research focuses on the psychobiology of stress and health, with a particular focus on early life stress and women’s health. A former sent-away child herself, she has been working with sent-away children since they first began making their stories public.
