117 million people with nowhere safe to go

I want to be careful here, because this subject invites two kinds of error.

The first is to treat the displaced as a category of suffering to be pitied rather than people with the full range of human experience and competence. The families I see in my clinic who have been displaced are not primarily defined by their displacement. They are defined by the same things all families are defined by: the relationship between parents and children, the quality of attention, the particular values being transmitted across generations.

The second error is to describe displacement as something that happens to other people, distant and abstract. It happens to specific people, including people your children may know. The child in your child's class whose family arrived last year. The family next door whose language you don't speak.

What I want to talk about is not the politics of displacement — there are better forums for that. What I want to talk about is the thing that displacement is most brutal about: it removes the scaffolding.

Parenting anywhere is hard. Parenting without a language, without a network, without the familiar cues of your own culture, without the relatives who would normally hold parts of the load — this is parenting at the edge of human capacity. And yet it happens, at scale, every day.