Ruthlyn James | The neurodevelopmental cost of Jamaica’s climate future

Jamaica is not simply surviving hurricanes; we are quietly growing a population shaped by them. We speak about damage and repair funds but those are surface wounds. The deeper injury is neurological, emotional and generational. Hurricanes are not only weather events, they are developmental events and our children are maturing inside an ecosystem of chronic climate threat, unstable learning continuity, fractured routines, and adult stress responses.

We are raising nervous systems trained by fear. The neuroscience is clear; children’s brains calibrate to their environment. Predictability wires calm. Chaos wires vigilance. Even before Hurricane Melissa, children endured a lot. Children’s brains do not reset with the power grid. They store the sensory memory and, here is the quietly devastating truth, a child’s chronic storm anticipation becomes their adulthood’s anxiety baseline. Hypervigilance is not a personality trait, it is a survival adaptation. The new developmental currency in Jamaica is safety. And, when safety becomes unpredictable, the brain stops prioritising learning and starts prioritising survival.

Executive functioning, the machinery of planning, reasoning, sequencing, reading comprehension and emotional regulation, is suspended when cortisol rises. In early childhood settings, this looks like impulsivity, clinginess, irritability, regression in toilet training or speech, and sensory defensiveness. We will soon see a generation marked by shortened attention spans, lower frustration tolerance, increased emotional reactivity, weaker working memory, difficulty delaying gratification, and stress-triggered behavioural escalation. Not because they are ‘undisciplined’, but because their brains are learning to live in emergency mode.

ATTACHMENT EROSION

Then, there is attachment erosion, the quiet casualty of crisis. Parents cannot co-regulate when they are dysregulated by fear. Emotional availability narrows and irritability replaces patience. Children internalise threats long after the storm clears. We do not talk about this enough. Climate instability is eroding secure attachment in Jamaican families and secure attachment is the foundation of learning.

We must also remember that Jamaica is loud. Sensory systems become overclocked. For neurodivergent children, hurricanes are not events; they are sensory assaults. Without trauma-informed sensory recovery protocols, we will see long-term consequences, increased autism burnout cycles, spikes in anxiety, shutdown patterns, oral seeking and stimming intensification, emotional dysregulation mistaken for ‘bad behaviour’, and widening developmental gaps. The storm does not finish when the rain stops. It finishes when the nervous system resets, and many never do.

Climate poverty and learning poverty are real. Before Melissa, Jamaica already faced a documented crisis; the World Bank’s 2023 data placed our learning poverty rate at over 50 per cent. Climate instability multiplies this. Disrupted school days widen cognitive and linguistic gaps in the first five years – the period that determines nearly 80% of brain architecture, according to UNICEF. Every lost week costs neurological opportunity and we are losing neural windows.

The Early Childhood Commission (ECC) has already recognised the importance of developmental monitoring through its ECI Census 2024–25, which gathers data on children with suspected special needs, teacher qualifications, and institutional standards. However, while registration compliance and teacher-child ratios (1:10 for ages three to five) are improving, the data still do not capture the emotional or neurological toll of repeated disaster disruption. Jamaica’s early childhood readiness system, evidenced in the Jamaica School Readiness Assessment used by the Ministry and ECC, offers a snapshot of preparedness but we need longitudinal data showing how recurring crises affect developmental outcomes over time.

CLIMATE GENERATION

The next step must be policy intervention that sees children not as victims of storms but as citizens of a climate generation. Jamaica’s future resilience depends on rewiring how we respond to the invisible damage within our children after each national crisis. We need a National Climate Neurodevelopment Protocol that prioritises emotional regulation and sensory stabilisation as essential phases of disaster recovery. The most urgent reconstruction must occur within the nervous systems of our children. Homes and schools should facilitate deliberate nervous system reset periods and play-based restabilisation, to help children regain equilibrium. Predictable routines must return before any formal instruction begins, but these routines must also intentionally address sensory dysregulation and the early signs of post-traumatic stress, ensuring that children’s bodies and brains are stabilised long before academic expectations resume.

Recovery must also be relational. Through attachment recovery plans, we must reimagine re-entry as relational first, academic second. Teachers should begin mornings with emotional check-ins that invite honesty and emotional literacy. Peer-connection circles can rebuild the sense of belonging that disasters often shatter. At home, caregivers need guided play directives, simple, healing routines that restore the attachment bond and remind children that stability and love remain constant even when everything else changes. This relational scaffolding is the invisible infrastructure that keeps learning possible.

Jamaica urgently needs a Climate Education Act that elevates uninterrupted learning from a fragile aspiration to a protected national right, guaranteeing that every child maintains access to education and psychological safety during climate disruption. Learning continuity must extend beyond the privilege of online access to include emergency curriculum pods and trauma-response kits. At the same time, the country must commit to a scientific national initiative that tracks the developmental, neurological, academic and psychosocial effects of repeated climate trauma. By publishing annual data on learning outcomes, executive function, mental health and developmental milestones, Jamaica can shape proactive education and health policy, transforming disaster response from improvisation to resilience-based planning.

Jamaica often declares that we are fighting to protect our future. However, children are not the future; they are the present wiring of it. Every storm scripts neural pathways, and trauma reshapes emotional architecture. If our educational and psychosocial systems do not evolve as quickly as the climate is changing, we will raise a nation of survivors rather than thrivers, and minds brilliant enough to endure but too strained to bloom.

Ruthlyn James is the founding director of Adonijah Group of Schools Therapy and Assessment Centre. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com