Letter: Not all harm leaves bruises

🎧 When Root Causes Begin in the Cradle

Sarah Mittelman explains how root causes begin in childhood

Editor’s note: Opinions expressed in this letter to the editor are those of the author alone and may not reflect the editorial position of ClarkCountyToday.com

The recent report of a 9-month-old baby found living in a needle filled tent in Seattle should disturb every one of us. According to outreach workers, the infant’s mother had repeatedly refused housing and treatment while continuing to live in dangerous conditions marked by addiction and instability.

Sarah Mittelman

Predictably, much of the public debate has centered on homelessness, addiction, and whether Washington’s child welfare laws have made intervention too difficult. Those are important questions, but this story should also force us to confront a deeper one: when policymakers talk about addressing root causes, what exactly do we mean?

Too often, root causes are discussed almost exclusively in economic terms such as poverty, housing instability, or lack of access to services. Those factors matter. But one of the most powerful root causes of lifelong dysfunction is rarely discussed with the seriousness it deserves: early childhood trauma and disrupted attachment.

A baby’s brain develops in relationship. In the first months and years of life, infants learn whether the world is safe through consistent caregiving, touch, eye contact, soothing, and emotional responsiveness. Secure attachment forms the foundation for emotional regulation, trust, stress tolerance, and healthy development.

When that bond is disrupted by severe addiction, untreated mental illness, chronic chaos, or neglect, the damage may not be immediately visible, but it can be profound. Not all harm leaves bruises. A child raised in chronic instability may develop a nervous system organized around stress and survival rather than safety and trust.

The long term consequences can include developmental delay, emotional dysregulation, substance use, mental illness, difficulty forming healthy relationships, and intergenerational trauma. In other words, many of the crises we spend billions trying to manage in adulthood often begin in childhood.

This is what troubles me about policies that require near catastrophic danger before meaningful intervention occurs. By the time a child is in obvious physical peril, significant developmental harm may already be underway. Protecting children is not only about preventing death. It is also about preventing lifelong developmental injury.

We say we want to address the root causes of homelessness, addiction, crime, untreated mental illness, and generational poverty. But if we ignore the earliest trauma shaping a child’s developing brain, we are not truly addressing root causes at all.

Instead, we wait until the traumatized child becomes the dysregulated adolescent. We wait until the struggling adolescent becomes the addicted adult. We wait until the addicted adult becomes the homeless patient, the psychiatric crisis, or the criminal defendant. Then we call that the crisis.

But the crisis often began years earlier, in a tent, in chaos, in neglect, in a nervous system learning that the world is unsafe. That is the tragic irony.

We spend enormous public resources managing the downstream consequences of trauma while hesitating to intervene at its earliest beginnings. If Washington is serious about addressing root causes, we must start where many of them begin: early childhood.

Few responsibilities of government are more important than protecting children who cannot protect themselves. Few failures are more costly than waiting until it is too late.

Sarah Mittelman, state representative candidate
49th Legislative District

Sarah Mittelman explains how root causes begin in childhood

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