ABSTRACT
I was invited to address the Chief Justices of the United States at their Annual Meeting on August 1, 2000, in Rapid City, South Dakota. The theme of my talk was to be “Trends in Child Development and the Family.” The National Council of Juvenile and Family Courts wished me to cover the following topics in the hour and a half that I was allotted: attachment theory, the impact of separation and loss on the child, the trauma of removal, the child’s concept of time, and issues of witnessing domestic violence. At first, I was alarmed and amused by the magnitude of the assignment and the meagerness of the time frame, but I soon realized that the Council members had no idea about the complexity of the issues they wanted addressed, and that, in fact, their expectations reflected the state of their understanding of psychological issues. I was assured that they would have no objection to my selecting from among the subjects suggested and setting my own priorities as to which were the most urgent.
